README

What does it do?

It does something that should be so simple but turns out to be very complex using PHP: reading emails from a mailbox using IMAP and then parsing the returned emails into a dev-friendly object.

Requirements

• PHP 5.4+
• PHP PEAR
• PHP IMAP extension
• PHP mbstring extension (mb_convert_encoding)

Installation

Simply require both classes (Email_Reader and Email_Parser) inside your code.

<?php

require_once('PATH_TO_FILES/email_reader.php');
require_once('PATH_TO_FILES/email_parser.php');

?>

• Note that you can use the Email_Parser class by itself without the Email_Reader class, but not the other way around.

How to use it?

Email_Reader is used to open an IMAP stream to a mailbox and then fetch messages.

<?php

$reader = new Email_Reader($mailbox, $username, $password);

$messages = $reader->get_messages();

$unread = $reader->get_unread();

?>

Email_Parser is used within Email_Reader to be able to decode the returned emails. It can also be used by itself to read emails, for example, from php://std in the case of email piping.

#! /usr/bin/php -q
<?php

$fd = fopen("php://stdin", "r");
$raw = "";
while ( !feof($fd) ) {
    $raw .= fread($fd, 1024);
}
fclose($fd);

$email = new Email_Parser($raw);

doWhaterever($email->from, $email->subject, $email->body);

?>

Footnotes

In order to write these classes, I had a lot of reading of other people's work and I would like to thank the following repository owners.

• eXorus for php-mime-mail-parser

Author

Jonathan Roy, web developper at OptimumWeb

Twitter: @jonathanroy