PHP E-Mail Processing and Notifications

We know from the previous article that the user ID is very important, in that it is used to retrieve various information from the database at various stages of the application. The login form sets this userID when you log in. It is the login system that will be the focus of this second part in a four-part series.

Setting up a web application to send plain text email is easy. What if you need the email to handle other content, such as images or special document formats? This article explains how to design a PHP class for sending email with attachments.

It s almost hard to believe that, up until a few years ago, putting pen to paper was still the most common method of corresponding with long-lost relatives or distant business partners. Today, email is all-pervasive - it has a user base ranging from doting grandmothers to over-enthusiastic dot-commers - and is, by far, the fastest, most efficient way to communicate. Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistin...

In the first part of this article, I demonstrated the basics of PHP s IMAP functions, using them to connect to a POP3 server and retrieve a list of messages from it. I also explained how to extract important message headers, showed you how to delete selected messages from the server, and gave you a crash course in PHP s session management functions.

In the previous segment of this case study, I taught you a little bit about how MIME attachments work, and demonstrated a few functions to handle multipart MIME email. At the end of that article, you had a fully-functional mail reader, though not one, alas, that allowed you to actually compose, forward or reply to a message. This concluding segment will rectify that problem, enhancing the application already developed by adding support for these ...

In this third part of a four-part article series on building a PHP email application, we will look at the index page. This page is the heart of the application. We will also look at how to handle attachments in a message and how to integrate them into this application.

In this article, the fourth and final one of our series covering the creation of a PHP email application, we are going to look at the code for some of the remaining pages of the mail application. Chief among these is the NewMsg.php page, which is where items, to be more precise, new messages, are either saved as drafts or saved as sent messages.

Do you want to send today s entry to your blog? Do you have a newsletter that cannot detect false receiver email addresses? Even though mailing lists are often supported by software such as mailman, ezmlm or majordomo it can be of great value to be able to receive mails via php. Newsletter, trouble-ticket-systems, an archive of mails, or an email based administration of websites or onlineshops are being enabled, if received mails are automatical...

Many applications in the field of Web development need to validate email addresses. While this can be done in a variety of ways, one simple but effective way involves writing your own functions in PHP. Alejandro Gervasio explains this approach.

In this second part of a two-part article, you ll learn how to manage email headers when creating a PHP email program, attach a file to a message, and more. This article is excerpted from chapter eight of the

The fascination with having software automate your mundane tasks never ceases. One such tedious activity lies in email parsing. Email accounts can be a useful tool for enabling people to enact a request or issue a command that may not require the intervention of humans. One such example is the, now all to common, unsubscribe request to harmless lists and nefarious spammers. The automated program that handles these requests is called ...

Don t you hate it when you are at a friend s house or visiting relatives and you want to check your email but dont know your POP/IMAP settings. Or even worse, they dont have your POP or IMAP software? Web based email seems to be the talk of the Net lately. Heres how to use PHP to make a quick, simple and effective IMAP or POP mail reader. Once this is done, you can now be able to read your email from anywhere in the world with only a web browser...

If you want to write PHP scripts that handle email, there are a few things you need to understand first. This article, the first of two parts, introduces you to these concepts. It is excerpted from chapter 8 of the

In this four-part series of articles we are going to build an email client with PHP. I will try to implement a full email client with all the functionality that you would expect from an email client, which includes a trash folder, sent items folder and a draft folder. But that s not all.

Anyone who has an email address can tell you that spam is one of the great banes of the online world. But it s not only distant servers owned by the spammers that are to blame. It may even be your very own server. Insecure PHP scripts have provided great opportunities for spammers to abuse other s resources to send out their spam. In particular, it s the mail() function that can be abused. I myself was the target a few months ago when I noticed s...

Communicating with website users via email is crucial to the success of any online service. The ability to deliver registration confirmations and newsletters, provide a convenient and relatively secure password recovery tool, and keep clients updated with shipping status reports are just a few of the reasons for incorporating email-based features into your website infrastructure. In this tutorial, I ll show you how to incorporate email delivery ...

Communicating with website users via email is crucial to the success of any online service. The ability to deliver registration confirmations and newsletters, provide a convenient and relatively secure password recovery tool, and keep clients updated with shipping status reports are just a few of the reasons for incorporating email-based features into your website infrastructure. In this tutorial, I ll show you how to incorporate email delivery c...

Server scripting languages like Lasso and Java servlets make sending mail so complicated that you d rather avoid it at all costs. Until recently, I have been relying on a cheap (read free) perl script from cgi-resources.com, but I want to be able to do this from PHP. Yesterday (1999-02-20), I decided to give email a whirl with PHP3. I needed to have a customized thank you page after sending the mail - like the rest of geo...

Tired of sending those drab textual notifications and newsletters to your friend and clients? Ever wanted to send attachments and/or HTML embedded email. The answer is MIME. The ensuing few pages explain the basics of MIME, creating MIME-compliant messages and then ends with a working class implementation of sending MIME complaint email in PHP. Note that references to calling script, caller etc. denote the script that uses the class we are about...

Asked to write an article about Apache and PHP, I had to take a moment to come up with a good sample application to demonstrate the beauty of Apache and PHP. It had to be something that I would personally like to use but simple enough for educational purposes, and something at least marginally original. A Web-based e-mail interface may not be a very original idea, nor is my humble example any match for the more advanced Web mail applications that...