How do I parse emails in realtime as they are recieved

Question

I need to build an email parsing script which would parse emails that would come into an inbox and dump the contents into a database, while at the same time make a curl request with details parsed from the email.

At this moment I'm quite stuck on implementing the part on how to parse emails in realtime as they are recieved in the inbox. Is there a way to set triggers to do something like this? I've extensive experience with working with php based webmail clients but this seems different though.

How can this be accomplished - I am assuming a cron job but if theres another way to do so I'm all ears.

Answer 1

Yes, there is. You can pipe emails to your scripts.

Assuming you are using cPanel, follow this steps:

• Log in to your cPanel.
• Click on the Forwarders icon, under the Mail tab.
• Click on the Add Forwarder button.
• Fill in Address to Forward and put the mail address you would like to pipe the messages from.
• Select Pipe to a Program and fill in the full path to the script which will handle the messages.

And here is a mail catcher example that sends received email to your other mail (just for demonstration):

#!/usr/bin/php -q
<?php
 
// read from stdin
$fd = fopen("php://stdin", "r");
$email = "";
while (!feof($fd))
{
    $email .= fread($fd, 1024);
}
fclose($fd);
 
 
mail('you@yoursite.com','From my email pipe!','"' . $email . '"');
 
?>

Answer 2

You would use a cron job if you wanted to do something at specific times. If you want to do something whenever an email arrives you need to tie your code into your email system. The usual way to do this is with Procmail (there is a recipe you can use (just read PHP for Perl/shell)).

Answer 3

I've been using the PECL extension mailparse on a website for a number of years now and it has been great.

I have all mail for a particular host get piped to a php script that uses mailparse to parse the message and insert it into the database, as well as process the attachments or multiple recipients.

They have an example file try.php in the download that was able to get me started.

Depending on what mail server you have the easiest thing to do would be to pipe incoming messages to your script like Quentin said. I use exim, and all I had to do was create a valiases file for my domain that looks like this: *: "|/home/site/process_mail.php" and from there mailparse does most of the hard work and I deal with the message and add it to the database.