Access gmail or yahoo mail using script

Question

I was wondering how one would go about writing a php script to access mail from yahoo or gmail ?

Answer 1

The "simplest" way would be to use IMAP to access the mails (i.e. don't try any kind of HTML scraping !). I have no idea for Yahoo, but I know you can enable IMAP in gmail.

There are several libraries in PHP that allow one to use the IMAP protocol to access a mailbox ; for instance :

• There are functions provided in PHP (You might have to install the extension, though) : IMAP, POP3 and NNTP
• Or you could use something like Zend_Mail.

Answer 2

You could use the Zend Framework Zend_Mail functionality, this would allow you to connect to GMail/Yahoo/etc with POP3 or IMAP.

Answer 3

One more to add to Pascal's suggestions: libgmailer