I've been receiving a lot of spam emails and I want to post them on my website to serve as a warning for others not to believe it. Since I'm too lazy to login to my email account and check. I'm thinking to write a script in php (since this is the only one i know)that logs in to the mailbox at regular intervals, retrieves the content of the e-mails and then post it to my website automatically. Any suggestions on what would be the best approach to accomplish this task? Do I have to do PHP socket programming?
Thanks
I suppose your emails are filed under a Spam or Junk folder. You may want to set up a Cron job that runs periodically to read via IMAP or POP.
You may want to check what're the protocols supported by your service provider and where exactly you want to post the information to - a database or HTTP POST.
Related
This tutorial teaches you how to create a contact form for a website using php script: http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/email.html
But how does this work? How does the script access the user's email account to send an email? How does such a form work without a server? (For example if I put my website on github pages which only handles static pages, how does this php script work?)
there's no way to make the server do something if the server does only throw HTML pages out.
You need some programming language (PHP in your tutorial) to process your code, it has to be installed in the server and accessible to you. It will run your code, decide what to do and do it (by the way to actually send the mail you will need the proper PHP modules available). In this case the script will not use the user's email account to send the mail: it is the server who sends the mail, not the user's client. You will receive an email from your server, so watch out to ask the user for his email, otherwise you will not be able to get it in any way.
If you have no serverside intelligence capacity, just use your user's tools. Which means stuck with the mailto scheme (as the tutorial's first examples show). Then the user's computer will send the email (with the drawbacks the tutorial points out)
It uses the mailto: URI scheme which is opened by your mail client just like skype: scheme is bounded to your Skype client.
I have an e-mail address that is signed up to a list-serv and I would like to set up a script to monitor it. If it gets an e-mail addressed to the list-serv, I would like to have the contents dumped to a secure webpage a user would log into (in a blog-style output, making it almost like one big thread for a forum) so that all of the e-mails are in a central location.
I'm pretty sure php has this type of capability, but I'm new to web dev so was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction of how I could go about this.
If you email provider supports IMAP you can use PHP IMAP functions to do this.
I'm investigating the development of a new forum and found via user feedback that posting to the forum via their email client would be a very useful feature.
I'm wondering: is it possible? Can php check for an inbox folder and turn each email into a forum post? And if so, how to do that in a LAMP environment?
Setting up a script triggered by receipt of email to a particular address would be the simplest. That way you don't need to write a new cron script. You would want to create a special email address dedicated to receiving such emails. The thread could be identified by something in the subject that would be required. I'm not sure of your use case so that's the best I can suggest. And you could also require the email to contain something to identify the sender as one of your authenticated forum members. You might need to expose a secret token to them or something. That way if any spammy stuff gets in you can block the account of whoever is sending it.
I believe some opensource forum software has this built in, or has an add on you can install to do it. Even though you're doing your own, you might like to get these modules to see how they do it.
You can create a sceduled (crontab, windows scheduler) script which does the job (reads all the incoming files from SMTP drop folder and posts the messages). However, two questions arise:
how will you know which thread to post to?
how will you filter spam messages?
PHP has IMAP functions that can read POP3 mailboxes. You would want to combine those with a cron job for frequent polling.
Some mail servers also offer triggers to run when mail comes in - you could create a trigger that calls a PHP script, passing on all the details of the incoming message. If you have access to your server and can implement this, it might be easier to work with because you don't have to connect to the POP mailbox yourself in your script.
If you have a POP3 mail box with good spam checking, this might work - although you would, as Naivists says, of course have to find a method how to identify the target thread reliably.
I have set up an email id my PHP web application. Users will send emails to this id.
I want to process these emails in the application. Ho do I go about doing this?
Thanks in advance.
I recently worked on a project that required parsing of email from gmail and updating database with certain values based on the contents of the email. I used the ezcMail (now) Zeta Components library to connect to the mail server and parse the emails.
The strategy I adopted was to filter all interesting incoming mail with a label "unprocessed". Run the PHP script via a crontab every 15 minutes. The script would connect to the mail server and open the IMAP unprocessed folder and parse each email. After inserting the interesting values into the database, the script moves the files to another IMAP folder "Proccessed".
I also found IMAP to be better than POP for this sort of processing.
Recently I wanted to be able to receive emails immediately in something I was making so I did some research (I came looking on this question here too actually) and I ended up finding Google App Engine to be pretty helpful. It has an api you can use to receive and process emails sent to ____#yourapp.appspotmail.com. I know that it doesn't really seem helpful since you probably don't want your app on App Engine and you want to receive emails at yourdomain.tld, but with a little setup you can get what you want.
My basic setup is like this:
User sends email to user_id#mydomain.tld (an email address that doesn't actually exist)
mydomain.tld has a catchall email address that forwards to inbox#GAEapp.appspotmail.com
GAEapp (a tiny app on app engine) receives the email, processes it out, and sends a post request with relevant stuff to mydomain.tld
So basically you can make a little GAE app that works like a go between to grab the emails. Even with the redirect it'll work out ok, the email will be fine.
Also I decided to learn me some django and I made a free app called Emailization that will basically do that for you. You create a recipient like ___#emailization.com and give a URL to POST to. Anything sent to that address gets POSTed to you URL. You can make a catchall on your domain that forwards to that emailization recipient and you'll get email through the catchall too!
or you can see a small GAE app I made that you can setup yourself that does the same thing.
Hope that helps somebody!
Use procmail if it is installed on your system. Put these lines in a .procmailrc file in the home directory of the user who receives the e-mail.
:0
| /path/to/your/script.php
Or you can also use a .forward file containing
"|/path/to/your/script.php"
Procmail has the advantage that it allows you to deal with more complicated filtering if your application ever requires it.
Your script.php file will read the headers and body of the e-mail from stdin.
Check out fMailbox. It does not require any non-standard extensions (such as imap) and has been tested with various servers, attachments, multipart messages, SSL, and more.
I suggest using Zend_Mail component of Zend Framework.
There is a great library: Try this: http://code.google.com/p/php-imap
You need to implement an email client in Php. This is probably going to be a POP client.
This code would query the POP server containing your email, download it, and then you could parse it as needed.
A quick google search of "POP client php" has revealed a vast array of different options. Its hard to tell if there's really "The One True PHP POP Library", otherwise I'd include it here. If you are using a preexisting framework, you may wish to check to see its level of POP support, otherwise check the google results above and take your pick. Or it may just be easiest (and most educational :) ) to roll your own.
There are a number of hosted solutions that will accept email for your domain and then post it a script on your website. Most of these will handle the parsing of the messages for you (separating the attachments, "to" "from" and other addresses, etc).
You just create a script that receives a FORM POST and does whatever you need with it.
Mailgun
CloudMailin
You can also look at Mandrill (by MailChimp), SendGrid, and PostMarkApp.
Hosted solutions as Travis Austin suggested work well.
If you are looking for a self-hosted one, you can have a look at the Mailin module allows you to receive emails, parse them and post them to a webhook of your choice.It also checks the dkim and spf, computes a spamassassin score and determines the message language.
I don't know if it will suit your needs since it is written in node.js, but the more options you have, the better. (Disclaimer: I am the maintainer of Mailin)
There is a great tutorial for this here:
http://www.evolt.org/incoming_mail_and_php
which covers how to have the emails forwarded directly to your script, which your script reads via stdin (fopen, fread, etc.) The tutorial code even does basic parsing of the header/body for you.
If you want to avoid reaching out over POP or IMAP to another server to pull-down the email, you can add a 'hook' into the email receive process on some SMTP server you set up (possibly the same php server). Then just have the destination email handled by this server.
Here is an example with postfix, but similar things are possible with sendmail as well.
http://www.adkap.com/autoresponder.html
I am constantly taking the following steps, and I know there's a way to automate this:
emailing photos from my phone to myself
saving those photos to my computer
uploading the saved photos to a website
Is there a way to write a script (perhaps in PHP), that does the following:
listens to any emails sent with
attachments to a bot email (ex:
bot#site.com)
automatically uploads any attachments sent to that email to the site? (ex: upload to www.site.com/photos)
If you must have it on your server, there are a couple approaches.
PHP can check a mail account via POP3 or IMAP. You could have a cron job running that fires off a PHP script to check a secret e-mail account every few minutes and process there.
Incoming e-mail can also be piped directly to a PHP script
I just use Flickr, and they give you a random e-mail address #flickr.com that you can send attachments to and have them automatically processed. That's the fastest and easiest option if you're okay with Flickr hosting your photos.
If your phone can go online, why email them and not directly upload photos to your site? Many mobile platforms have clients for adding entries and images to blogs and hosting services like Flickr. Maybe there is such a client right for your phone?
Script on its own is a passive thing. I'm not familiar with PHP though but... If you have a page open 24h/day, you could put there JavaScript calling some server method in loop once in 10 minutes to check for emails and if there are attachments just initiate asynchronous form post.
Would be great if you could elaborate and whatever you have at your disposal. Is it your site and you have administrative access or you just a user? Is there maybe an API to use in addition to just HTTP POST?
I believe, unless it's your own site, you will need somewhere a PC running all the time with either a browser window or a desktop program open.