How to move large amounts of mail with PHP? - php

Question

I'm trying to write a PHP program that uses the IMAP PHP extension to run through a very large inbox (greater than 70,000 emails), and move all emails that fall within a specified date range into a folder. I keep running into problems trying to get the mail that falls within the desired range.
First I tried using the SINCE and BEFORE criteria in imap_search() to place all of the desired ID numbers into an array, and then created a string listing these ID numbers to feed into imap_mail_move(). But the problem I keep running into is that imap_search() never actually returns all of the emails within the specified range. For instance, I ran the following code:
echo "Beginning search. \n";
$mail = imap_search($this->mbox,
'SINCE "$startDate" BEFORE "$endDate"');
echo "Search complete. \n";
if (!$mail){echo "The inbox is empty. \n"; die();}
$count = 0;
foreach($mail as $i)
{
$count = $count + 1;
}
echo "Found $count emails. \n";
while specifying a date range that I know to hold 600ish emails, and imap_search() only listed 259 of them. When I expanded the range to encompass the entire inbox of about 75,000 emails, imap_search() only returned 25,112 of them.
When this didn't work, I tried a different, slower way to get all emails within the desired date range. I used imap_search() to collect ALL emails in the inbox, then I iterated through each email, compared the date contained in the emails header to the dates definining my interval, and added the ID to a string if it was in range. I ran the following code:
// Get all mail in the INBOX
$mail = imap_search($this->mbox, "ALL");
if (!$mail){echo "The inbox is empty. \n"; die();}
// Create a string list of all message IDs
//that fall in the specified range
$processed = 0;
$IDsequence = '';
foreach($mail as $messageID)
{
$date = imap_headerinfo($this->mbox, $messageID)->date;
try {$dateObject = new DateTime($date);}
catch (Exception $e) {echo $e->getMessage(); echo "\n";}
$dateObject->setTimezone($TimeZone);
if ($dateObject <= $IntervalEndDate && $dateObject >=
$IntervalStartDate)
{
$IDsequence = $IDsequence . "," . strval($messageID);
}
$processed = $processed + 1;
if ($processed % 100 == 0)
{ echo "Processed $processed emails. \n"; }
}
// If we got at least one message, cut off the first comma.
if (strlen($IDsequence) > 1){
$IDsequence = substr($IDsequence, 1, strlen($IDsequence)-1);
}
else
{
echo "No e-mail to move. \n";
die();
}
echo "Beginning copy. \n";
imap_mail_copy($this->mbox, $IDsequence, $TargetFolder);
echo "Copy complete. \n";
//imap_expunge($this->mbox);
imap_close($this->mbox);
After iterating through just over 25,000 emails, it began to print the error message 'object does not exist' referencing the line of code where I collect the date from the email header. I notice here that the breakdown still occurs somewhere around 25,000 emails, so perhaps both methods break for the same reason. I suspect that I am doing something wrong with the message IDs (for instance, I am assuming that the message IDs for the 75,000 emails are '1' through '75,000').
What is going wrong? Is there a way to collect a large number of emails that fall within a date range and move them?

Answer 1

Perhaps there are only 25,112 messages in the mailbox, and the other ~50,000 are in another mailbox. I know GMail, for example, may report a rough total for the Inbox, but a good percentage of those messages are actually archived.
You might want to do a sanity check at this point. :)