How do I receive email and process it in a web application

Question

I have set up an email id my PHP web application. Users will send emails to this id.

I want to process these emails in the application. Ho do I go about doing this?

Answer 1

Use procmail if it is installed on your system. Put these lines in a .procmailrc file in the home directory of the user who receives the e-mail.

:0
| /path/to/your/script.php

Or you can also use a .forward file containing

"|/path/to/your/script.php"

Procmail has the advantage that it allows you to deal with more complicated filtering if your application ever requires it.

Your script.php file will read the headers and body of the e-mail from stdin.