Extract attachments when piping mails to PHP

Question

I know with my cPanel hosting I can pipe an email inbox to a script, but what I want to do is:

1. Send to hi@hi.com
2. Pipe to mail.php
3. mail.php reads the subject, and a .txt attachment
4. The contents of the subject and .txt attachment are stored in the database

Is there a way to do this with straight-forward PHP?

Answer 1

You'll probably need do the following:

1. Write a PHP script that's executable at the CLI (by adding a #! declaration at the top of the script that points to the PHP binary, then settings its executable permissions).

2. Get that script to read the raw email from php://stdin (file_get_contents is easiest)

3. Get that script to decode the mail in to parts, using something like PEAR::Mail::Mime::Decode or I think there's a handy Zend Framework component).

4. Read the attachment and subject from the decoded message, and store as normal

5. exit(0) at the end to tell the CLI that it was a clean exit - any other exit() status could cause a bounced email.