In the first part of this series I discussed how to connect to IMAP servers using PHP's IMAP extension. In this part we'll complete the series by discussing working with folders and reading email content. Let's get started!

He shows how to work with the "flags" set on messages (read, unread, replied, etc) - pulling them from the server and using the imap_setflag_full function to set them. There's a quick mention of deleting messages with imap_delete/imap_expunge and a section on viewing and downloading the attachments to messages.

Automatically extracting attachments from Gmail can be important for reasons where you need to process the attached files periodically with a CRON job. Also it can be useful for automatically archiving important attachments. Below is a simple proof-of-concept plain PHP code, devoid of any object-oriented features that extracts attachments from your Gmail account. It uses PHPs imap extension to access the inbox.

His simple script opens an IMAP connection to the Gmail server and loops through your current emails (max of 16) and tries to find any that have attachments. It then extracts this part of the message, base64_decodes it, and saves the set of them to the local file system. You can download the source here.

I'm still working in my filesystem with CouchDb. After creating a library to enable working with PHP and CouchDB (see the post here), and after using Monkey Patching to override standard PHP's filesystem functions. I've created another solution now. Thanks to a comment in my last post (many thanks Benjamin) I've discovered that it's possible to create a stream wrapper in PHP (I thought it was only available with a C extension).

He includes the code for the stream connection wrapper, a pretty simple script that parses the string it's given and opens a read/write stream to the source. There's also a "url_stat" method that will return to you the size of the stream in bytes. Then you just register the wrapper and go about your normal file system calls to use the CouchDb directly.

Using exim filters we could add attachments at the delivery stage, therefore reducing overhead in constructing and injecting data into an email. The delivery of emails varied as to whether it was feasible to send as a BCC or whether there were placeholders intended for each individual recipient. As such the following addresses the worst case scenario of attachments with placeholders intended for each individual recipient.

They show how to use a PHP script (that uses streams to pull in the file data and information) hooked into an exim_filter to streamline the attachment process. Configuration file examples are included in the post as well as the PHP source for creating the filter.

At the request of some of our readers, this week, we'll examine just how easy it is to send emails with attachments using Gmail. With raw PHP, this would be a long and tedious task. However, with CodeIgniter, it's a cinch! I'll show you how in this eighteen minute video tutorial.

You can watch the video via their in-page player and grab the source code if you'd like to follow along.

In this article we will look at the protocol that is involved in sending email messages. We will also examine the thorny issue of how to send an attachment with an email message. This article is the second of two parts.

They include examples of sending simple messages and more complex ones with things like attachments and custom headers. They also tack on a look at the PEAR::Mail package to the end showing how it can make sending some things a little less painful.

Using PHP's built in function (aptly named mail() ) is relatively straightforward - until you need slightly more advanced features, such as adding and encoding email headers or sending multiple mails efficiently. Fortunately, the Zend Framework comes with a very capable mail component called Zend_Mail.

He shows how to send a simple email, do something a bit more complex with a custom SMTP server, read messages from a remote POP3 email box and how to attach a binary file/message.

While each of these [PEAR Mail, PhpMailer, SwiftMailer, Zend_Mail] will work with Solar, the new Solar_Mail and Solar_Smtp packages work "natively", in that they support automatic configuration, locale and exception inheritance, and so on. Read on for some examples on how to use them.

In his example he sets up and sends a simple message, setting the contents of the email (sent as an HTML message). Since there's been much talk about the safety of a lot of the mailing systems in frameworks, Paul talks about how it's been secured from header injections, through safe attachments, and from a transport dependency-injection for SMTP.

There's even a method included that lets you take the SMTP information out of the script and put it into the Solar configuration file to use in the entire application.

Here's a link to the first article.

Sometimes it can be useful to have a dump of the current database schema. This script reads the schema from a MySQL database and outputs XML that describes the schema.

And a link to article number two.

So, you want to send automated email messages from your PHP application. This can be in direct response to a user's action, such as signing up for your site, or a recurring event at a set time, such as a monthly newsletter. Sometimes email contains file attachments, both plain text and HTML portions, and so on. To understand how to send each variation that may exist on an email, we will start with the simple example and move to the more complicated.

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.

In this part they cover some of the details about the structure of emails, how to add an attachment to an email (for both a normal file and images for an HTML email), as well as a mention of how email is delivered.