Handling Incoming Email Attachments

hello all,

I'm trying to figure out a way to manipulate incoming email attachments with
PHP. There'll be a special email address to which the emails with the
attachments would be sent, with a number specified in the subject line. What
I need to do is to grab the attachment (a photo), rename it with the number
specified in the subject line, and move it onto a specific folder on the Web
server [which will be running LAMP].

I couldn't find any online material describing how to manipulate incoming
mail attachments. Can someone give an idea?


Thanks,

Chuck Finster

Nirmal Jayasinghe wrote:
> hello all,
>
> I'm trying to figure out a way to manipulate incoming email attachments with
> PHP. There'll be a special email address to which the emails with the
> attachments would be sent, with a number specified in the subject line. What
> I need to do is to grab the attachment (a photo), rename it with the number
> specified in the subject line, and move it onto a specific folder on the Web
> server [which will be running LAMP].
>
> I couldn't find any online material describing how to manipulate incoming
> mail attachments. Can someone give an idea?
Hi,

For handling e-mail in all their sorts (believe me, it is hell), I found
the PECL mailparse the best solution. It can find the attachments and
their MIME-types in a snap. And all the headers are separated too.

You only have to wrap functions around it to do what you want to do.

Be sure to validate the attachments and do not rely on the MIME-type
only. People can spoof that kind of files.
--

Aschwin Wesselius

/'What you would like to be done to you, do that to the other....'/

> For handling e-mail in all their sorts (believe me, it is hell), I found
> the PECL mailparse the best solution. It can find the attachments and
> their MIME-types in a snap. And all the headers are separated too.
>
> You only have to wrap functions around it to do what you want to do.
>
> Be sure to validate the attachments and do not rely on the MIME-type
> only. People can spoof that kind of files.

There's also the PEAR mimeDecode class as well. A PHP solution so it
won't require you to reconfigure/compile anything.


--
Richard Heyes

+----------------------------------------+
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Hello,

on 05/06/2008 06:36 AM Nirmal Jayasinghe said the following:
> hello all,
>
> I'm trying to figure out a way to manipulate incoming email attachments with
> PHP. There'll be a special email address to which the emails with the
> attachments would be sent, with a number specified in the subject line. What
> I need to do is to grab the attachment (a photo), rename it with the number
> specified in the subject line, and move it onto a specific folder on the Web
> server [which will be running LAMP].
>
> I couldn't find any online material describing how to manipulate incoming
> mail attachments. Can someone give an idea?

You may want to try this MIME parser class. It can parse the e-mail
messages of any size and optionally save the attachments to files in a
directory of your choice.

http://www.phpclasses.org/mimeparser

If want to parse messages retrieved from a POP3 mailbox, you may also
want to use in conjunction this POP3 class which comes with a stream
wrapper that lets you access messages in the POP3 mailbox as if they
were files. You can use file names like this: pop3://pop.server.com/1 .

http://www.phpclasses.org/pop3class

When used in conjunction, these two classes allow you to extract
attachements from messages of any size without exceeding your PHP memory
limits.

--

Regards,
Manuel Lemos

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