How would I implement an upload by email service for my photo sharing website?

Question

I have a photo sharing website in development and want to be able to allow users to add photos and video by email attachment. I have email addresses for the site (hosted with goDaddy). I also have a LAMP CentOS application server running on Amazon Web Services EC2 that processes files uploaded via my web-based uploads page, so would like to use the same PHP scripts to process files sent as email attachments. My first questions are -

1) To get the attachments to my application server would I use PHP's IMAP/POP functions to get the emails from goDaddy? Periodically check for new emails?

2) Is it as easy as setting up a catch-all email address and giving users a unique email to send photos to (eg. [email protected] and give each user [email protected]) Then look for emails with the .photos bit and use the username bit to determine who uploaded the photos...?

What other steps would I need to implement? Any other advice about how best to achieve this is welcome

Answer 1

Why not just have one email address, eg. [email protected], and then look at the sender address to determine which user the photo belongs to?

Answer 2

You could forward those emails to your EC2 instance and pass them to a shell script. I remember doing this with a line in my .forward file like this:

|/path/to/my/script

The script would get the email via STDIN. That way you won't need to check your inbox periodically as emails would get delivered instantly.

To identify users I would suggest having unique secret email addresses for each user, as it's really easy to spoof the sender address. You could setup a catchall address (e.g. *@post.example.org) so you don't need to configure each address separately.