Everyone that's worked with PHP for any length of time knows that it has expanded far beyond it's web-only roots into the world of being a sysadmin tool for easy automation of everyday tasks. People have been using it for everything from a smile shell script to rotate out files, to the topic of this new PHPBuilder article - creating a "mail bot".

In How to build a mailbot in PHP, the author helps you create a bot that will automatically unsubscribe you from spammers lists:

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 a mailbot. Though it was adopted early, and has been retired in many cases in favor of web-interfaces, mailbots still represent a good technique for performing a number of useful tasks. Nearly anything can be done with enough creativity, good code, and patience.

It's a pretty fun little script, and could be quite useful for those out there using sendmail (I'm sure with a few alterations on how it's used, you could use it with just about any mailer daemon...)

Thanks to PHPEverywhere for the link.