Processing IMAP email in PHP

Question

I need to process an email inbox, monitor it for messages with a particular subject line. If it finds a match I need to get the body content, manipulate, and insert into a database. Ideally would mark the message as read and move it to another IMAP folder as well.

I'm poking around PHP documentation imap_open (http://us2.php.net/imap_open) and found a link http://www.linuxscope.net/articles/mailAttachmentsPHP.html#_jmp0_

Before I get too far, I'm wondering if anyone is aware of an existing PHP class that's a good wrapper for the basics I'm looking for:

IMAP:

• connect
• list folders
• list messages
• read messages - from, to, subject, body
• move messages to server folders
• read/unread status

Thank you!

Answer 1

I've tried Zend_Mail for IMAP and have some highs and lows. I could connect and read, move emails but it is quite buggy. You can check for subject or sender, parse headers, reach attachment by parsing different parts.

Zend_Mail_Protocol_Imap is not using any of the PHP imap/ext function. (Why?) Reading folders with thousands of emails is slow. The internal order of a folder is not actually chronological, which is so strange. Probably depends on how the storage was implemented (I parsed a google.pro account). Sometimes the connection closes unexpectedly and debugging it is quite heavy.

There is also a Pear_IMAPv2, which is beta and I could not even succeed in installing. The alternative will be to install imap/ext and do everything by yourself.

Good luck.

Answer 2

I've not used it for anything but sending mail, but it appears that the Zend_Mail component will get you at least most of the way there. It doesn't seem to support moving messages on the server, but you could probably extend it fairly simply.