Reading email into a PHP script

[cavey5]

Let me explain the problem I am trying to solve, and maybe you will better understand what I need:

 

I run a magazine and we get a lot of customer service calls from subscribers, also emails, PM's etc on all the forums we're on - from all over the world. People just cannot seem to email our customer service account or call the center, they PM my employees on odd forums. Eventually, these get funneled back to one person; amazingly she handles all CS for the whole company. So I wrote her this beautiful piece of PHP wonderment that manages all of  our subscriber accounts from our server, its just a database front end but it's cool :-)

 

It includes a private messaging system so other employees can send her messages, like forwarding a phone call message about a problem customer. The reason I have them going thru the PM system in my software is that emails get lost, sticky notes and paper messages get lost etc... when they send her a PM though it is in her inbox, and when she sits down to go thru service calls, they are all right there and logged and saved; especially if they knew the subscribers ID or name, it will pull the account up for her when she clicks the account number. It works great.

 

The only problem is that my other employees have to log in to the software in order to PM her. What would be cool is if they sent an email to a specific account, an account only used for customer service and not used to reply to anything... and when you sent an email to this account, it showed up in her inbox inside this software. It would ignore attachments and simply include who it was from, a subject line and a message. That's it, everything else is stripped out and everyone sending to this address (non-public personnel) would know this.

 

My question is how do I check an email account (on my server locally) for new messages and read it into PHP variables? Is there a method or functions built for this sort of thing?

[rarebit]

You need to handle the email side separately (bash, python, etc) and get that to call a web page with appropriate details to send a PM... (maybe SID or cookie, for an account which doesn't time out)... (or it could just update the database directly!)

[sljaxon]

This may help: http://www.phpit.net/article/read-email-php-pop3/.