New Email Launches Webpage?

[RISTMO]

Hey,

I doubt this is the right forum, but oh well... I'm trying to accomplish something very similar to Facebook's text messaging system. I don't have a clue how they do it, and after an hour of searching Google, I still haven't found any good results.

Anyway, what I'm trying to do is set up an email account that will launch a php page every time a new email is received. The trick is that the webpage has to be able to read the email when it's launched. It would work great if the text of the email could be passed to the page (through the querystring?) when it opens. Is any of this possible? Is it a simple process? Are there any good tutorials on how to do this?

Thanks,
Rick

RISTMO Designs: Rockwall Web Design
Arab Church: Arabic Christian Resources
Genuine Autos: Kaufman Chevrolet & Pontiac Dealer
Rick Morgan's Official Website

 

[sleipnir214]

Yes, it is possible.

How easy it is depends on your environment. For example, if the receiving email server in question is postfix or sendmail or qmail, having a script react to the arrival of an email and actually parse the contents of the email is fairly trivial. If you're running Microsoft Exchange, it's significantly more complicated.

Since the method of accomplishing this will vary by your environment, the best tutorials will be found in the documentation of your mail server.



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[RISTMO]

Hey,

I talked with the network team here... We're running the regular IIS mail service to send emails from the web server. I'm not sure entirely what's involved here, but if they install "the rest of the package" that lets the server receive emails as well, would it be terribly hard to set up the trigger using the regular IIS smtp system? Could you point me to a good place to find that? Or would you recommend an entirely different approach?

Thanks!
Rick

RISTMO Designs: Rockwall Web Design
Arab Church: Arabic Christian Resources
Genuine Autos: Kaufman Chevrolet & Pontiac Dealer
Rick Morgan's Official Website

 

[sleipnir214]

Insufficient data for a meaninful answer.

I simply don't have enough experience scripting mail arrival on IIS' mail service. But my first impression is that if you want to use IIS' mail service for this, PHP would not be the language of choice, but rather some VB variant.



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[RISTMO]

Thanks! I'll ask in the ASP forum.

RISTMO Designs: Rockwall Web Design
Arab Church: Arabic Christian Resources
Genuine Autos: Kaufman Chevrolet & Pontiac Dealer
Rick Morgan's Official Website

 

[dkdude]

Reading pop3 mail thru PHP - this shoudl get you started:

http://dk.php.net/manual/en/function.imap-open.php

Regards

 

[jpadie]

@dkdude
that's a pull mechanism which does work (it's what i use for various needs). you need to poll the mailbox on a preset schedule and so be able to set cron jobs etc.

i think what RISTMO was asking for was an event trigger. Exchange server does have event triggers (called event sinks/hooks). best to seek more info in the exchange server forum (assuming, since RISTMO uses IIS, that he is also using exchange)