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.
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Answer
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 theMail
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 . '"'); ?>