Reading forwarded email from Perl or PHP

[D.TC]

I know both Perl & PHP pretty well but have never had to process incoming email and have therefore come back to asking a novice question.

I need read into Perl/PHP variables email that has been forwarded to the module using the cPanel facility. If anyone has a short example script that demonstrates picking up the variable or variables that contains a forwarded email it would be much appreciated. I would prefer Perl as PHP will require a great deal more code to achieve the processing required once I have the email data, but if necessary I can live with PHP or translate the script into Perl.

Cheers
David

[developmentxl]

Hi David,

Not 100% sure what you're trying to do but I do know of a PHP extension that is great for reading/parsing emails:

http://pecl.php.net/package/mailparse

Of course this is only of use if you can get access to your PHP installation...

Anyway, not sure if that's any use, but it's sort of relevant!

- Andrew

[D.TC]

Hi Andrew,

Trying to use the cPanel facility to forward mail to a perl program from which the possibilities are endless. The main thing it provides is an alternative to quick VB/Net (yuck) (hidden FTP) programs written so that users can tailor things on their web site hosting that would otherwise require a logon level that I am not keen to give naive experimenters.

Rick has just informed me that they haven't enabled forwarding to perl and I will have to use PHP, so I am thinking laterally at the moment. Things are getting "dirty". PHP does not have all the facilities I require, so I will either have to use PHP to pass variables to Perl or run a cron, and I always try to avoid that on shared boxes.

Your pointer to the url doesn't suit this time, but I can see many times that it will for other stuff. Many thanks - it's been bookmarked.

BTW: Love your home page. Loads well too. Hope you can still get about up there - the sno looks pretty bad on some webcams.

Yours Aye
David

[developmentxl]

Hi David,

Yeah it's quite cold, but we're used to it!

I can't see why, if you can pipe the emails to PHP, you can't pipe them to Perl using cPanel's "forwarders" page?

If you must use PHP, you could always just have it write the raw email data to a temp file then exec() a Perl script on this file (using http://search.cpan.org/~markov/Mail-...il/Message.pod) - messy, yes, and I'm sure you've already thought of that!

I'm afraid that's the limit of my knowledge on the subject, hope someone else can help!

- Andrew

p.s. thanks for the complements on my website hosting. Your domain is really rather awesome!

[D.TC]

Hi Andrew,
I too don't see why not a Perl is restricted unless eukhost are concerned that some users may not be aware of the security dangers of some of the more powerful facilities in Perl especially with OS calls. However as most people on these forums equate PHP to Perl, I doubt whether anyone would ever get near to using the full power of Perl.

I think I need to drop them an email stating my experience and ask them to unlock it for me as....

Originally Posted by developmentxl

If you must use PHP, you could always just have it write the raw email data to a temp file then exec() ...

... is something I have thought of too, but as we have both said, it's messy. If a temp file is used there are also timing implications (easily got around) but it just adds more hacks. I guess if eukhost won't move I will have to use a cron or get back to writing more VB/.Net
code, but that causes an additional problem as I then have to implement stuff on the client machine. A restricted visible FTP is no good as I would just get comments like "I'm not paying you to do the work myself". I guess it's just a case of - watch this space - for the moment.

Thanks for complement on domain - one day I'll put something there, but all my time seems to be spent on sites that earn. The way I came about the domain was amusing. When Turk and Caicos came on line I was there at the first minute. People in IT know me as David TC or just TC so I went for david.tc. Some company had run a batch job and it was gone along with every first name you could think of. In frustration I tried 'd' and to my surprise got it. The only problem is that some programmers think that the UK 3 letter domain rule applies world wide and restrict their forms ignoring people like BT and little ol' me, and I end up using one of my other domains at times.

I will post up developments as they come along and provided that eukhost don't offer a privileged connection I will post the code later.

David