I have a small web app to which users upload photos. I want to let them email in their photos (from their iPhones/Android phones) and a number associated with that photo. It'd be kind of like posterous but only allow emails with one photo and one number.
How could this be done?
I see two ways, but I'm not sure if I'm even close.
1) Have one email (like Posterous) that users send mail to, then send to it from the same email that their account is under.
2) Have a unique email for every user that they can email to. (But this has the problem that anyone could send emails to the unique email.)
To do either way, you'd need to have a filter on the mail server that takes incoming mail and fires off a script that inserts that information into the db, or does whatever else with it.
It's not too hard, but usually requires admin (or root) access to the machine, i.e., can't be done in a shared hosting environment.
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I've written a small script that simply (as simple as email can be) downloads emails so I can play with them later. The part that I don't seem to be able to grasp quite perfectly is that the msgno can (will) change when new emails get added or emails get deleted. Okay, that's fine, but then for the uid, this also can (will) change when emails are moved from folder to folder.
So in PHP, for example, when I execute imap_search and get a list of msgnos or uids, how do I reliably use these to get emails for a changing email box? In this example, there are multiple Outlook clients connected to this mailbox with many rules for auto-moving emails from/to specific people, etc. that's bound to move emails after I've already gotten the ID's, and before I actually get to processing that email.
In this case, what do you do? I would very much so like to avoid the email just "not existing" by the time I get to it, or worse, the ID in that IMAP mailbox be resigned to a new email.
I have to set up an email sending solution, and I haven't yet figured out the best way to do this, I hope you have some ideas. I would like to achieve the following:
Have a central email address like mailinglist#mysite.com.
Behind this list there is a database of email addresses. I would like to be able to extend this list through an API. For example if a new user registers on my site, I want to add them to the list. Or if someone unsubscribes, I want to remove him from the list.
On my website I will place a button, and if the user clicks it their email client opens with the central address prepopulated.
If they send an email to this address, everyone will recieve it who is on the list.
If someone replies also everybody will recieve it.
(The application is written in PHP (Laravel framework) if that is important).
Do you know of any service where I can set up this kind of "mailing list", preferrably for free? (It would have a few hundred members, sending a somewhere around 30-100 emails a month.)
I guess you'll need root access to your (linux) webserver - then you can hook Sympa (read "list of features") into your MailTransportAgent (MTA) (postfix, exim) or whatever.
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.
We are developing a email web site.but we are facing problem in receiving and validating the mail.i have the following doubts.can you please help me in clarifying these???
one more important thing is we are not using squrrelmail, qmail etc.
how do we receive emails for users in email web site?
do we save all the received emails in admin's mail box or in database as per the username
(my idea on email web site is,all the incoming mail are stored in admin's mail box and after the email mail is stored in database,and then the mail deleted in admin's mail box.Is it correct.if not how to store the emails in database directly in web site)
what is the technique behind the receiving mail???i think there are various techniques like email piping etc.
is there any special process of creating users for email web site,i mean do we need to create mailbox(i think mail account) for each user at the time of registration.if we need to create mail box for user,can we create it with imap_createmailbox() function.
are the users gmail,yahoomail etc are accessig database or their mail accounts at the time their login??
can we do all these things with imap functions in php??
There are many different solutions to this problem, polling existing servers, adding scripts to run when a message is received or using a gateway like CloudMailin. I wrote a blog post relating to this (it's for rails but almost all applies to php too).
The other problems almost all span from how you setup the first thing. In many cases you could just log the emails directly to your database and retrive them based on the recipient address. I think you need to explain exactly what you want to do with the email? Are you just providing email hosting for your users or are you providing an additional service? If you're just providing hosting then there are simpler approaches available.
Is there a way in PHP to update an email id in a mail server if we have the access details of the mail server. The requirement is as follows.
I am developing a community website which need a provision to upload photos to their photo gallery by sending an email. We planned to create email id for each user so that they could send emails with photo attachments to that id. A cron job will search for emails inside those id's and if it finds a mail with attachment, uploads the file to the server and subject of the email will be considered as the photo caption.
But it has a security loophole such that anyone who knows the email id can send an email and add photo to others account. We are planning to have a security code in their id which can be modified by user if required.
eg. name.XXXX#domain.com where XXXX is a four digit secret code. THe user can change that code whenever required. i.e. the email id can be name.1234#domain.com or name.3452#domain.com according to the user's wish to maintain privacy. So is there a way to edit the email id using PHP functions.
Creating email accounts and/or aliases would certainly be possible with PHP, but it would depend so much on your server setup.
Another route to consider would be to not have any real email boxes, but to instead have all email delivered to a catch-all account and have your cron script search through that one mailbox and compare all recipient addresses against a database, then you don't have to worry about actually creating real email users on the server.
Additionally, in terms of improving security, you could have each user authenticate which sender email addresses are allowed to send emails with photo attachments. It's still not bullet-proof, because sender addresses can be spoofed, but it's an extra step in the right direction.