I need to create a system that will pipe incoming emails to a PHP script, then get rid of the email. Technically, I don't want these email addresses to actually exist. I would want to validate the email address by checking a database. So if I have a database with say 100 email addresses (i.e. 2323#mydomain.com), the PHP script would parse the email, store the contents in a database for later use, and then discard the email.
I piped emails to a PHP script in the past and parsed the email. However, my understanding of this requires the email address to exist.
I figure a catch-all account would be a bad idea, as SPAM could account for the majority of incoming emails, which I have no use for.
I could create the emails dynamically perhaps, if that is even possible with PHP, but again, I don't actually need to store the incoming email. Eventually the server would get bogged down with emails that I have no use for, especially since the contents would be stored in a database.
There will be no manual management of the incoming emails. Everything would be automated. While I'm sure I could use the PHP imap extension to delete emails say every 30 days, this seems unnecessary.
Any suggestions on the best setup for this?
Automation of email address creation or wildcard catch
Parsing of email, storing and discarding
Please have a look at a GitHub Project PHPMailer and the documentation is available here.
You can also try sendgrip, another good SMTP mailer for PHP.
These projects do not have a direct functions to delete e-mails, however, you will have to bake your own code extending some of the classes. Good Luck!
See http://harrybailey.com/2009/02/send-or-pipe-an-email-to-a-php-script/ for an excellent article that explains how to pipe incoming mail to a PHP script. You should be able to configure your MTA with a wildcard on your domain (so that it accepts mail to anyaddress#yourdomain.tld) and forward each incoming message to your PHP script. Your PHP script can then pickup the sender, recipient, subject, etc., query your database, and process the message accordingly.
Related
I need to handle some mail. I already have a script built that can parse through a mailbox and perform several actions like save attachments, move email to a folders and other administrative tasks. A few of the emails are identified as rogue during this process and need to be forwarded. The messages may or may not have one or more attachments and are dumped into their own folder labeled fwd.
I can create and send new email messages but am having trouble finding information on forwarding or replying to existing email. One solution would be to save the parts (body, subject, attachments) to a database and construct a new message with MIME::Lite but this seems inefficient at best.
I am handling the email with Net::IMAP::Simple::SSL and MIME::Parser.
Since the email is dumped into a temporary folder for holding I am not totally against using a PHP script to handle the messages, but prefer something in line with my current Perl handler to execute the task.
Looking for some helpful info to help complete this task.
You might want to look into CPAN at Mail::Box, a rich (and a bit complex) module handling mail messages, including primitives such as message->copy and message->reply.
For documentation and examples, author's website is at http://perl.overmeer.net/mailbox/
I'm confused about how mail works in PHP and CakePHP.
1.) What is the difference between sending an email either using the PHP mail function / CakePHP email helper or SMPTP as shown here: http://book.cakephp.org/1.3/en/view/1290/Sending-A-Message-Using-SMTP as the outcome looks the same?
2.) To specify who the email is coming from, you pass in the email in the header, but you can put whatever you want, so what is stopping you from just putting in anything? like yourbank.com? mail('you#gmail.com', "Subject", "Message", "From: <dave#yourbank.com>"); I just tried it and it worked fine and I couldn't find out anyway in Gmail to see if it didn't come from dave at yourbank.com...
Hopefully I can get some light on these two questions. Thanks.
1). CakePHP has a bunch of helpers & functionality implemented to make life easier when developing applications. As you've discovered, Cake has mail functionality. I suggest reading this whole page http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-utility-libraries/email.html (It's 2.0 not 1.3, so please not there have been some big alterations between the two versions). The article covers in depth on why you may configure something in a particular manner.
CakePHP is using the default mail function with PHP. It's just allow you to incorporate views into the content and configure the outgoing mail in a much easier manner.
2) As for putting in potentially any email address within the From Header.... this can potentially fall under the category of Email Spoofing, essentially sending an email when it's not authorized from the source (From Header). Again this links back to configuring specific mail servers.
By default mail clients and generally setup to prevent spam and junk, this is done by taking a large amount of steps. Some may be..
Keyword checking, (Checking the contents of an email for any
keywords classified as spam).
Header checking, <--- This is the one that answers your
question.
Essentially... headers are examined and checked to see if the server that the mail was sent from has the authority to use the given from address.
As I don't have enough technical knowledge, i'll throw a few pages your way which discuss setting up records against your DNS/Domain so emails are validated correctly and not put within spam folders.
http://www.ipswitch.com/support/imail/guide/imailgsv8.1/Appendix%20A%20dns4.html
http://help.postageapp.com/kb/application-features/dkim-and-spf-setup-and-validation
How to properly set up DNS SPF records?
I hope my jumbled ramblings make some sort of sense.
Question 1: PHP mail function uses your own server's built in email functionality to send email. If you use SMTP, you're connecting to another server (eg. Google's mail servers) and using that server to send the email.
CakePHP's email component can use either PHP mail, or SMTP, depending on how you configure it.
The outcome is basically the same in many respects. Which way is best for you will depend on your set up, the volume of email you're sending, whether your own server has any restrictions with regards to sending mail, etc. If you Google "PHP mail versus SMTP" or similar, then you'll get some info to help you decide which is best for you.
If you're not sending much email, eg. if you're just wanting to send the results of an enquiry form that gets submitted a few times each day, then just use PHP mail and don't worry about it.
Question 2: Although email programs put various measures in place to make sure mail is legitimate, basically nothing stops fake emails completely. You can send Fake email. Check out this site: http://deadfake.com/Send.aspx and in particular, their FAQ section: http://deadfake.com/FAQ.aspx
Spam filters do their best to catch fake emails, but ultimately it's up to the end user to keep their wits about them, especially with banking emails!
I have seen on some sites where the user can simply send a blank e-mail to something like verify#domain.com to have their e-mail verified if they are having trouble getting the verification e-mail. I have a website with PHP/MySQL that I'd like to implement this same functionality, but I haven't done much with e-mail besides sending it so I don't even know where to start to set something like this up.
Basically if your mailbox is an IMAP you could reference these functions via PHP http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.imap.php (if enabled, check your phpinfo()) and read that specific mailbox (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.imap-open.php).
Run a cronjob every 10 minutes maybe (I say 10minutes as I dont see many people doing this), loop thru all the emails (if any), run your logic to verify that email account, send them an email to say its been verified, then delete that email item from your account so you are not creating a massive backlog of emails.
Its risky way of wanting someone to verify but this is probably one way of doing it.
If your host allows you to, you can pipe received email to a program (in your case, a PHP script), which could then parse the message and decide what to do.
However, I agree that this isn't very secure. It would be very easy to spoof the sender, unless you implement DomainKey checking or DNS lookups.
Alright, this may take a moment or two to explain:
I'm working on creating an Email<>SMS Bridge (like Teleflip). I have a few set parameters to work in:
Dreamhost Webhosting
PHP 5 (without PEAR)
Postfix
MySQL (If Needed)
What I have right now, is a catch-all email address that forwards the email sent to a shell account. The shell account in turn forwards it to my PHP script.
The PHP script reads it, strips a few Email Headers in an effort to make sure it sends properly, then forwards it to the number specified as the recipient. 5551234567#sms.bridge.gvoms.com of course sends an SMS to +1 (555) 123-4567.
This works really well, as I am parsing the To field and grabbing just the email address it is sending to. However, what I realized that I did not account for is multiple recipients. For example, an email sent to both 5551234567 and 1235554567 (using the To line, the CC line, or any combination of those).
The way email works of course, is I get two emails received, end up parsing each of them separately, and 5551234567 ends up getting the same message twice.
What is the best way to handle this situation, so that each number specified in TO and CC can get one copy of the message.
In addition, though I doubt its possible: Is there a way to handle BCC the same way?
If you check the headers of the mail, you should find a Message-ID field (according to RFC2822 - section 3.6.4). So you could test if you have already sent an SMS for a mail with the same Message-ID & phone number to prevent sending the same message to the same number twice.
Why not use something like imap to check the catch-all mailbox, loop through the messages and then delete them once finished? That way you don't need to forward them to a seperate account.
Stupid dirty solution: parse all recipients from the mail, then send them SMS, then put em all into temporary table with md5 of message text. And check all incoming mails against this table.
Although wimvds had the best answer here, I found out elsewhere that Dreamhost includes a "X-DH-Original-To" header in the way I'm running it through the system. Using this, I'm able to send to each number individually upon receipt of the email without checking it against a database. This should also work with Blind Carbon Copy (I don't know the specifics of how email works enough to tell you how that works).
I am currently writing a music blog. The administrator posts a new article every 2-3 days. Once the administrator posts an article, a mass email will be sent to around 5000 subscribers immediately.
What is the best way to implement the mass mail feature?
Does the following function work?
function massmail()
{
$content = '...';
foreach ($recipients as $r) {
$_content = $content . '<img src="http://xxx/trackOpenRate.php?id='.$r.'">';
mail($r, 'subject', $_content);
}
}
Another question: If all 5000 subscribers are using Yahoo Mail, will Yahoo treat it as a DDOS attack and block the IP address of my SMTP server?
First off, using the mail() function that comes with PHP is not an optimal solution. It is easily marked as spammed, and you need to set up header to ensure that you are sending HTML emails correctly. As for whether the code snippet will work, it would, but I doubt you will get HTML code inside it correctly without specifying extra headers
I'll suggest you take a look at SwiftMailer, which has HTML support, support for different mime types and SMTP authentication (which is less likely to mark your mail as spam).
I would insert all the emails into a database (sort of like a queue), then process them one at a time as you have done in your code (if you want to use swiftmailer or phpmailer etc, you can do that too.)
After each mail is sent, update the database to record the date/time it was sent.
By putting them in the database first you have
a record of who you sent it to
if your script times out or fails and you have to run it again, then you won't end up sending the same email out to people twice
you can run the send process from a cron job and do a batch at a time, so that your mail server is not overwhelmed, and keep track of what has been sent
Keep in mind, how to automate bounced emails or invalid emails so they can automatically removed from your list.
If you are sending that many emails you are bound to get a few bounces.
This is advice, not an answer: You are much, much better off using dedicated mailing list software. mailman is an oft-used example, but something as simple as mlmmj may suffice. Sending mass mails is actually a more difficult task than it actually appears to be. Not only do you have to send the mails, you also have to keep track of "dead" addresses to avoid your mail, or worse, your mailserver, being marked as spam.
You have to handle people unsubscribing for much the same reason.
You can implement these things yourself, but particularly bounce handling is difficult and unrewarding work. Using a mailing list manager will make things a lot easier.
As for how to make your mail palatable for yahoo, that is another matter entirely. For all its faults, they seem to put great stock in SPF and DomainKey. You probably will have to implement them, which will require co-operation from your mail server administrator.
You may consider using CRON for that kind of operation. Sending mass mail at once is certainly not good, it may be detected as spam, ddos, crash your server etc.
So CRON could be a great solution, send 100 mails at once, then wait a few minutes, next 100, etc.
Do not send email to 5,000 people using standard PHP tools. You'll get banned by most ISPs in seconds and never even know it. You should either use some mailing lists software or an Email Service Provider do to this.
Why don't you rather use phplist? It's also built on top of PHP Mailer and a lot of industry leaders are using it. I've used it myself a couple of times to send out bulk mails to my clients. The nice thing about phplist is that you can throttle your messages on a domain level plus a time limit level.
What we've also done with a couple of internal capture systems we've got was to push our user base to the mailling list and then have a cron entry triggering a given mail each day. The possibilities are endless, that's the awesome thing about open source!
Also the Pear packages:
http://pear.php.net/package/Mail_Mime
http://pear.php.net/package/Mail
http://pear.php.net/package/Mail_Queue
sob.
PS: DO NOT use mail() to send those 5000 emails. In addition to what everyone else said, it is extremely inefficient since mail() creates a separate socket per email set, even to the same MTA.
Also have a look at the PHPmailer class. PHPMailer
You can use swiftmailer for it. By using batch process.
<?php
$message = Swift_Message::newInstance()
->setSubject('Let\'s get together today.')
->setFrom(array('myfrom#domain.com' => 'From Me'))
->setBody('Here is the message itself')
->addPart('<b>Test message being sent!!</b>', 'text/html');
$data = mysql_query('SELECT first, last, email FROM users WHERE is_active=1') or die(mysql_error());
while($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($data))
{
$message->addTo($row['email'], $row['first'] . ' ' . $row['last']);
}
$message->batchSend();
?>
I already did it using Lotus Notus and PHP.
This solution works if you have access to the mail server or you can request something to the mail server Administrator:
1) Create a group in the mail server: Sales Department
2) Assign to the group the accounts you need to be in the group
3) Assign an internet address to the group: salesdept#DOMAIN.com
4) Create your PHP script using the mail function:
$to = "salesdept#DOMAIN.com";
mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
It worked for me and all the accounts included in the group receive the mail.
The best of the lucks.
There is more into it aside from using a software. If you could create a bulk emailer program that sends intermittently. Say if you will send 5,000 recipients, create a loop that would send 38 lists per sending then pause for 10 seconds. I have an actual experience sending 500 manually per days for the past weeks and so far i have good results.
Another consideration are the content of your email. Nowadays it is a standard that you need to put your physical office address and the "unsubscribe" opt-out. These are factors that majority of recipient emails servers are checking. If you don't have these they will classify you as spammer.
Mailchimp is my best recommendation to use if you want a paid service provider in sending to your email subscriber NOT sending unsolicited or cold email marketing.
Hope it helps.