I am sending some mailings to a 5k list. I am not using any mailing commerce services. As expected I am getting some mails back from my mail-deamon and I would like to delete the those from the recipient-list. Is there a way to read the pop-mails programmatically?
is there maybe an easy and quick workaround?
A way to read POP mail via PHP: PHP: Download incoming email from POP3 or IMAP, parse it, and mark it as read/delete on server
(The code provided in the answer is using the functions suggested by Lèse majesté in its comment, but you find a ready to use small piece of working code thet does exacly what you need).
Obviously you will need to write also the code to programatically delete the address from your newsletter's DB.
I would use a cronjob (very easy to set on an hosting with cPanel) to programatically call the code that read the POP3 account and deletes the invalid addresses from DB.
A workaround? I don't know.
Can't you just set your "from" and "reply-to" address to an email address you can check? and then just check that email inbox to see what has bounced.
Related
I notice that a lot of websites like Facebook and GitHub allow you to reply to an email notification which then posts the reply back to the application using a unique Reply-To address. How does this work on the back-end? I searched a lot but, only found that people were using unique Reply-To addresses. That's understandable but, what do they use to receive these emails? Do these companies set up email servers? I am trying to build this using PHP.
A common method is to set unique message ID's in the outgoing email and then looking at the In-Reply-To header to see which email this was in reply to. That lets you match up your server application's messaging system to emails. For example, if you send an email that represents a help desk ticket with ID 1234, the Message-ID could be something like
ticket-1234#myserver
Then, in email clients that work nicely (I'm looking at you Android), when you hit Reply, the reply has the header In-Reply-To: ticket-1234#mysever. You can go further by adding security tokens to ensure people can't forge messages (e.g. ticket-1234-hf29e9f2gf2e9fh29f#myserver). That security token is generated on the server when you send your first message and is then confirmed in the reply.
This normally works but can cause real headaches when email clients don't behave as they should!
This is how GitLab manages emails by using an identifier in the email address itself and catching it when the user replies. Although it is not relevant to any scripting language like PHP and uses server configs, this is what backend servers do to support reply by email functionality.
You have to set up a mail server to receive mail answers.
SIEVE filters on a IMAP server could be use to make some actions when a certain filter is detected.
But you can't only use PHP to make that type of system.
I'm in need of setting up an auto-response from an email account that I control, based on trigger words within the body of the email. But also, it needs to add/delete rows from a database table based on trigger words sent to this email account (that belongs to my site) and it needs to create a topic, in some cases, within a forum, if sent to a different email address (but on the same server). I know PHP to be able to do this, but not really sure how to trigger a PHP script to be executed when an email gets sent to a specific email address account that I control. Or if there is another solution to accomplish this, please let me know.
This is basically an inquiry on how to accomplish something like this, based on an email sent to a specific email address on my server with words like: "Join", "Leave", "Set Mail", "Set Digest", etc. etc.
There will be another email address account set aside that will need to send those subscribers in the database, the same exact email (Mass Send). This is for a CDB-L ListServ. Kind of old school I suppose, but we want to transfer this ability to our server, since these old school methods still work today and is very much active.
Curious on security issues, what type of server software I'll need and just a basic approach on how to set something like this up.
You can alias your email address directly to a php script if you run your own mail server (on linux this would just be in the /etc/alias file or equivalent where the target was your php script instead of an email address) eg http://www.topwebhosts.org/bbs/board.php?bo_table=server_mgmt&wr_id=73
If not, then your only real choice is to set up a php process that checks an email address for mail every x minutes.
I have used both these methods over the years to great success
You can walk through emails with PHP's IMAP functions and undertake action (based on conditions/content). More info.
I looking into building a system that can read and send mails all by itself.
The mailserver already exists. All I want to do is fetch the e mail data with a php script running locally on the mailserver, store some of the data in an external database.
Then when an "event" is raised, I want to run a php script that get's some data out of the database, create a mail , and send it through the mail server.
I'm fairly new to this, so I hope the things I say make sense.
Here's my question: Is it secure enough to work this way?
Am I doing anything against "the rules" ?
Thanks
There is nothing wrong in doing the things this way. Its not against the rule. But Email Deliverability is not guaranteed because:
There is no guarantee that the email you send will pass the spam filters of email providers.
Number of emails you send to 1 user in a day, Any spam keyword in the mail content, user marking your email as spam etc.
Basically, there are n number of reasons why your mail server might get blacklisted by email providers.
To ensure Email Deliverability, you need to get your mail server IP whitelisted with all the email providers. (which is not easy)
I would suggest you to use bulk email sending third party solutions like Sendgrid, Madmimi, etc.
Refer: Discussion on choosing email sending service
Also, these services also gives statistics like open tracking, click tracking etc...
i want to have a script that will save gmail emails from an account in mysql db using php. Mails(both freshly new and reply ones) will be marked to be in the same category if they have the same subject. That is just the same way in gmail or yahoo mail.
So far as I know gmail IMAP does not give the facility to track which are the reply mails.
Which API or whatever should I use??
The script will keep running.
Do I need to use scheduled task for that?
I haven't worked with that, but as i Google around, it turns out GMAIL provides IMAP Extensions API. And there you have an option to Access to the Gmail thread ID: X-GM-THRID
The reply emails as you call them are stored in the sent-mail folder, so just download them with IMAP.
You can track how emails go together using the In-Reply-To: and References: headers. Using the subject is not reliable.
#sof_user : every mail will have message_id in the header. google tracing the email with the id, if it is reply, then IN-REPLAY-TO will have the same id.
I have a PHP website that send a validation code when a new account is created.
My problem is since few months, a lot of those email goes in the spam folder.
I thought of a solution that is to use an "external service" to send my email instead of simply sending it via the mail function in PHP.
Question : 1) What external service should I use (I guess it would requires to have an API)?
Try using your ISP's or company's server as a relay. Use a sending address which exists, so that validation can be done on it, and bounces sent back to it. You may want to setup a separate domain for verification such as verification.example.com. You could then send the validation message from application#verification.example.com. Replace application and example as appropriate.
You may also want to look at https://serverfault.com/questions/241189/email-delivery-management-grievances#241260.
Have a look at this documentation from Google. It involves your network support including reverse lookup and Domain keys to be present. I think most of the email servers would have similar requisites.
Many times, when using the builtin mail function, the configuration isn't set up to help prevent this from happening. The reason is the Received header is set to an internal IP address, like 192.168.x.x which is used as an indicator to most spam filters. You may want to try finding a simple SMTP class that connects remotely so the headers get set properly.