How to read email attachment

Question

What I have:

A person daily sends to me an email, which has a zip'ed XML attachment.

What I do:

I save that attachment, unpack it and import via XML importerer to my web site.

What I need:

Automatic script, what I can automatically forward my email to ex.: [email protected] and read that attachment via some php file in my website, which maybe will be activated daily via server cronjob.

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Is it possible to code this?

And maybe someone has any pre-coded scripts.

Thanks for answers.

Answer 1

This can be done using the ZZIPlib library

I have implemented the following post with good results.

http://www.timlinden.com/blog/website-development/unzip-files-with-php/

Hope this points you in the right direction.

Answer 2

If you're on a Unix host and the mail is (or can be) sent to a local account on that machine, you can forward the email directly to your PHP script without needing to access a mail account directly.

You can do this in /etc/aliases:

 nameofaccount: "|/path/to/your/script.php"

or in the account's ~/.forward file:

 "|/path/to/your/script.php"

As long as you set the script up to be treated as a shell script (chmod 755, with appropriate #!/usr/bin/php shebang at the start), the script will be executed each time an email comes in and you can (I believe) retrieve the full email's text from the php://input or php://stdin stream.

After that it's just a matter of seperating out the attachment and processing that.