README

Receive mail and attachments with PHP

This package can be used to...

Parse, decode and read email from Postfix, and others still WIP.
For reading messages (Filename extension: eml)
Create webMail
Store email information such a subject, body, attachments, and etc. into a database

Usage

Full documentation is a work in progress, see Phpunit tests folder for more example usage.

MailReader.php contains the class that works with the incoming email, and the database.

MailParser.php contains the class that works with any file that's in an email format.

mailPipe.php is a sample script using the MailReader class.

mailPipe.php expects to receive raw emails via STDIN.

You can run the script manually by using cat

cat tests/testfile | ./mailPipe.php

Or type On Windows

type tests\testfile | php mailPipe.php

You will likely want to copy mailPipe.php to your own script and adjust the parameters to suite your needs.

This library also allows you to easily parse an email given its content (headers + body).

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use Mail\MailParser;

$emailPath = "/var/mail/spool/dan/new/12323344323234234234";
$emailParser = new MailParser(file_get_contents($emailPath));

// You can use some predefined methods to retrieve headers...
$to = $emailParser->getTo();
$subject = $emailParser->getSubject();
$cc = $emailParser->getCc();
$from = $emailParser->getFrom();
$fromName = $emailParser->getFromName();
$fromEmail = $emailParser->getFromEmail();
$attachments = $emailParser->getAttachments();

$actualContent = $attachments[0]['content']

// ... or you can use the 'general purpose' method getHeader()
$emailDeliveredToHeader = $emailParser->getHeader('Delivered-To');

$emailBody = $emailParser->getPlain();

Installation

composer require forked/mailreader

Will pull composer forked/mail_mime-decode package in as dependency.

Setup

Configure your mail server to pipe emails to this script. See http://stuporglue.org/add-an-email-address-that-forwards-to-a-script/ for instructions.

Make this script executable, and edit the configuration options to suit your needs. Change permissions of the directories so that the user executing the script (probably the mail user) will have write permission to the file upload directory.

By default the script is configured to save pdf, zip, jpg, png and gif files. Edit the method array property $allowed_mime_types around line 47 to change this. Or call ->addMimeType() to add more.

Postfix configuration to manage email from a mail server

Next you need to forward emails to this script above. For that I'm using Postfix like a mail server, you need to configure /etc/postfix/master.cf

Add this line at the end of the file (specify myhook to send all emails to the script mailPipe.php)

myhook unix - n n - - pipe              flags=F user=www-data argv=php -c /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini -f /var/www/mailPipe.php ${sender} ${size} ${recipient}

Edit this line (register myhook)

smtp      inet  n       -       -       -       -       smtpd                   -o content_filter=myhook:dummy

License

Licensed under the same terms as PHP itself and under the GPLv2 or Later. You are free to use this script for personal or commercial projects. Use at your own risk. No guarantees or warranties.

Support

If you have problems, you are encouraged to post them on the MailReader GitHub issue tracker instead of as comments on my blog.
MailReader is OpenSource. You can pay (or not) anyone you want (including yourself!) to work on MailReader, the code is here.
I will accept GitHub pull requests that fix bugs or add features. This sort of maintenance will be done for free.

Thanks

Many thanks to forahobby of www.360-hq.com for testing this script and helping me find the initial bugs and Craig Hopson of twitterrooms.co.uk for help tracking down an iOS email handling bug.

Versions

July 9, 2019

many additions, library more OOP compliant.
added methods to easily retrieved records from the database.
added additional classes to work with any email formated file/folder.
added PSR-4 support, can now be installed using Composer.
added phpunit tests, and email files to test against.
removed allowed senders, any email received with script will get an reply if turned on.
the mailPipe script now setup to auto locate the database config and create database if not initialized.
general code clean up.

May 21, 2013

UUEncoded attachment support
It's now a class
Uses PHP PDO connection with prepared statements instead of mysql/mysql_real_escape_string
Support for inline content type (from mail app on mac?)

April 14, 2012

Uses PEAR's mimeDecode.php
Support for more mime part configurations

March 24, 2010

Initial release
Works for me, for gmail.com
Homemade parser!

forked / mailreader

Maintainers

Details