Once or twice a year i find myself in the position of having to develop complex emails.
They often include Plaintext and Html versions, along with attachments and other headers.
Previewing the development using standard send/receive is painfully slow and tedious.
What i'm looking for is a local testing platform that processes the mail function and provides a mail client style preview with access to alternate views, headers, etc. Or possibly a real mail client that can take mail directly.
I've searched and searched but no luck so far, hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.
Thanks in advance. TT
I'm not sure if this is what you want but you can use your localhost mail and access it via thunderbird for example
How do I read local email in thunderbird? - Ask Ubuntu
Via this way you don't have to wait endless for mail to be delivered as it's local. And you can see your send mail in a actual mail client
I don't know any software but I had some good experience with the following online service: http://litmus.com/ It's somewhat like browserstack. (live crossbrowser testing tool)
I use Papercut, which listens to a SMTP port, catchs all e-mails and shows headers, source, text and html view. It's very useful!
I have now solved this.
In the php.ini file there is an option to set an export path for the mail function called sendmail_path.
I set this to tee mail.eml > /dev/null and it now saves the sent mail to the same directory as where the function is called and i simply open it with my mail client.
sendmail_path = tee mail.eml > /dev/null
2 notes on this.
this is a solution for unix platforms only.
the file extension has to be set to suit your chosen mail client
For a task like this I use fakemail for receiving the mails into a maildir and mutt for reading the mails. Mutt can also be configured for reading HTML mails.
If you just want to log the emails without reading them, you could use the "logmail" approach described in this article by Chris Shiflett:
Edit: The lastcraft.com host seems to be down at the moment, my Google search for "fakemail" revealed this Python project that might be helpful: https://github.com/isotoma/FakeEmail
If you're just looking to preview your HTML emails (and alternatively, if you need help designing them) you can sign up for a free MailChimp account. It's actually an email send service, but they also have an interface for a drag-and-drop email builder.
For your situation, you could use the "code your own" tool, drop in your HTML, CSS, plain text, etc. and then preview the email in all sorts of email clients, test at different screen resolutions, etc.
(*I am not affiliated with MailChimp)
You can also try https://github.com/ycecube/phpmaildebug.
It uses the php's sendmail output to capture the mails.
Related
I´m using Drupal (PHP) and sometimes I use it to send email to some of my registered users (ie. using a contact form located inside their profile). This is very common in every CMS, PHP forum, etc.
The thing is that Drupal usually prints out a successful message when the email was sent, and not always the email is actually sent.
On the other hand, my hosting uses VHM panel with VPS servers.
From their control panel I can check all mail that goes from my server to the outside. In VHM it´s called "Mail Delivery Reports". That´s accurate enough, and I think most VPS control panel probably have some similar utility.
My question is: When Drupal tells me that the email has been sent, and I go to the Mail Delivery report on my hosting control panel, and it says that it has not been sent. Is that a PHP flaw?
Is there a way to get accurate reports within PHP?
Please excuse my grammar. It has been kinda difficult for me to actually get myself clear on what I mean in english.
UPDATE:
I´m not asking if the user reads the email, not even if it later on gets bounced, just to know if PHP has some accurate way to report if the email was sent.
I know there are some services offering that, but I´m just asking about PHP capabilities (and if that´s actually possible).
PHP responsibility is to give it to your specified transport method. (sendmail, smtp etc.) and tell you if the transport accepted it or not.
If you use sendmail (or postfix) what php tells you is that it has been queued for sending and nothing else. PHP doesn't know if it will be sent or not. unless you parse the queues and try to go from there.
No. It is impossible for PHP to track sent emails. That is not, never has been, and never will be, PHP's job.
PHP simply generates the email (e.g. builds the html) and then hands it over to a mail transfer agent. e.g. your local sendmail.
In a real-world equivalent, PHP is you walking an envelope down to the street corner and dropping it into the mailbox. If the letter disappears down the chute, PHP will report success. After that, actual DELIVERY of the mail is entirely out of PHP's hands.
Maybe the mailbox gets flattened by a drunk driver, maybe the pickup truck gets into a firey crash, maybe the postal sorting facility gets hit by a meteor, etc...
None of that is PHP's problem, and undetectable by PHP anyways. It walked down the street, it saw the letter disappear down the slots. Mission accomplished.
At best you could set the "return service requested" mail headers, which 99.99% of people will probably ignore or disallow, or embed a web-bug inside the email and hope that the recipient's mail client will actually load the bug.
I have special e-mail accounts on my web server (#mydomain.com). I want to run a php script automatically when one of these accounts get a new e-mail. For example: when info#mydomain.com address receives a mail, I want to run "receivedMail.php" file and read this new e-mail. I don't know where I will start or how can I do this.
You're wanting to pipe email received for a specific email address to a PHP script.
If your webhost has cPanel, this makes it very easy to setup. See:
http://kb.siteground.com/how_to_pipe_an_email_to_a_php_script/
Alternatively, if you don't have cPanel but have Exim mailserver, this will guide you on how to do this:
http://www.phpshare.org/articles/Piping-Incoming-Mail-with-PHP
Hope this helps!
You have to create a cron job calling your php file every 1 minute for exemple.
The script have to the derver and read the email.
This has nothing to do with web servers directly, Since web servers do not receive emails. So no .htaccess style files come into play. The email is received by a mail server, so that is where you have to get active. Two strategies are possible:
you use the possibilities to trigger an action as offered by your
mail server (typically the smtp server you operate). That obviously
depends on which mail server you operate, different software offers
different features.
you poll those email accounts on a regular base, using a standard protocol like POP3 or IMAP4. You can do this using any suitable client. When a new message is found whilst polling the account, then you trigger the action you wish.
Option 2. is probably easier to start with. So give it a try: create a php file which polls your email server. You can use the imap php extion for this, it supports all important email protocols. The extensions allows to easily detect and retrieve new messages. For each such message you can implement whatever action you wish. All that is left is to run this script on a regular base, say every 3 minutes, which is typically done using a cron system. There are many examples for this out there on google...
Have fun!
I have a strange requirement.
I need to read the outlook emails from a local pc using php .
I will get user credentials.
so is there any way to do this ?
it need to work well in all major browsers.
Thanks.
Not sure why you would want to try to get this from a LOCAL mail file on a 'single' pc, I would rather attack this from a POP3/IMAP route, it would THEN be a PHP based mail client, or whatever you need it for (fetching mail, filtering, checking, triggering an event, etc;).
But what you describe is just not feasible for anything, I can't see a client paying to have simple client mail accessed via PHP.
Here are some PHP / Email reading references:
http://garrettstjohn.com/entry/reading-emails-with-php/
http://davidwalsh.name/gmail-php-imap
http://www.tuxradar.com/practicalphp/15/6/3
i am searching for a way to read mail messages from a PHP application, including access to attachments etc. imap functions are not acceptable as a solution, as this application will handle mails with heavy attachments.
i have full access to the server's mail folder from php via filesystem. any thoughts?
I think you could use a combo of the Pear packages Mail_Mbox and Mail_mimeDecode. Use Mail_Mbox to read new mail from the inbox, one message at a time, and use Mail_mimeDecode to extract the attachements. All this will be done w/o IMAP. You can then save the read messages to a different mbox to keep the inbox clean.
Pear - Mail_Mbox
Pear - Mail_MimeDecode
I had a question like this a while back. See if any of the answers help you:
How to get email and their attachments from PHP
postfix + maildrop was the solution I ended up taking, It routes the emails through to a PHP script when it arrives and in my case, the PHP does something with the attachment. But I only needed to read each email once. If you need to be able to browse all the emails, you either need to store the results of maildrop or find another solution.
If you need to full access to all emails, POP and IMAP are popular choices because they do work. I'm not sure why you're against them.
Hi I have been reading alot of articles adoring the PEAR mail package and it seems like PEAR is something I need to try out.
I am interested in setting up a full mail server, similar to a conventional SMTP mail service; which incorporates mail queuing, resending with a backend database etc. My impression is that PEAR can do this but can its service be used with mail clients like outlook to send mail, just as how any any smtp server daemon can where one would enter a portnumber, server name and/or security protocol?
Thanks
No, PEAR isn't going to magically solve these problems for you.
PEAR is a collection of PHP classes that are meant to solve common problems faced by PHP users. The Mail packages offer code for interacting with different parts Email systems. They do not contain code for creating email systems from scratch.
For example, form the Mail_Queue documentation
The Mail_Queue class puts mails in a temporary container, waiting to be fed to the MTA (Mail >Transport Agent), and sends them later (e.g. a certain amount of mails every few minutes) by >crontab or in other way.
The MTA in this case in sendmail, postfix, etc.
Another example, from the Mail_Mbox documentation
It can split messages inside a Mbox, return the number of messages, return,
update or remove an specific message or add a message on the Mbox
Incorrect use of "an" aside, you are using this to read existing MBOX files, and not caring how they got there.
The Mail package is about interacting with existing mail systems, NOT creating replacements. You'll still need to understand how all those email systems work to create a "full mail server, similar to a conventional SMTP mail service". If you're doing this because you want to learn how email systems work, have at it. If you're doing this because you thing this will give your business some leg up in the email game, I laugh and say "good luck with that"
PEAR is a repository for lots of libraries. Some of them deal with mailing.
PEAR's Mail class is designed for sending mail only. It is not designed as an implementation of an SMTP server.
Pear Mail is an SMTP sender aka client, not an SMTP server. Although it's entirely possible to write server (any kind of server) in php that doesn't mean that writing an SMTP server yourself is necessarily a good idea as it requires quite some expertise to do it right (spam anyone?). If you want to see an SMTP server implemented in a scripting language, go have a look at Lamson, written in Python by Zed Shaw.
And while you're there, do read the About page. This quote says it all
However, as great as Lamson is for
processing email intelligently, it
isn’t the best solution for delivering
mail. There is 30+ years of SMTP lore
and myth stored in the code of mail
servers such as Postfix and Exim that
would take years to replicate and make
efficient. Being a practical project,
Lamson defers to much more capable
SMTP servers for the grunt work of
getting the mail to the final
recipient.
It seems to me that PEAR's MailQueue package may address your needs.