How to programmatically capture emails? (like posterous)

I need to programmatically capture emails as well as any files that are attached to them using php. Also is r开发者_开发问答unning a cron job the only way to continue checking if there are any new emails or is there a way to automatically fire some code as a new email arrives? Thanks any help is appreciated!

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To the second part of your question: If you run your own mail server and want to avoid polling to fetch new messages, then you can add an entry to /etc/aliases that lets your MTA know to forward to your PHP script, like so:

uploads: "|/usr/bin/php -q /var/flickr/uploads.php"

This entry will tell your MTA to pipe any emails for uploads@example.com to uploads.php. From there, you can read STDIN, parse the MIME message, and processes it as you please

(stolen from Cal Henderson's Book Building Scalable Websites. I highly recommend Chapter 6)

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I have an application that does exactly that.

1. Create a daemon (regularly executing program), called InboxDownloader that connects to your inbox and checks for messages. If there are messages, have that daemon just download them and place them into a folder for further processing.
2. Create another daemon MailProcessor, that goes through the downloaded files and parses them out. The way I go about it is using regular-expression based signatures to determine what kind of message arrived. I have a set of classes that each register as a potential "handler" for this type of a message, and if the match is made, the handlers "execute logic" method is executed, and the full contents of the method are passed to it.

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Did you look at how Postie does it for WordPress?

See also the Fetchmail tool.