PHP: get contents of a remote webpage that require authentication?

Question

I receive many emails whose contents are of the same pattern, e.g.

Name: XXX
Phone: XXX
Bio: XXX
......

I want to write a PHP script to parse these emails and save the data into a database. I tried to use file_get_contents() to get the contents of these emails.

The problem is that, it requires authentication to access to my emails. Even though I have signed into my email account on the server (localhost actually), file_get_contents() still return the webpage that prompts me to sign in.

So how to access the contents of my emails with a PHP script?

EDIT: it is a gmail account.
The following code does not work.

$login_url = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth';
$gmail_url = 'https://mail.google.com/';
$cookie_file = dirname(__FILE__) . '/cookie.txt';

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie_file);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_file);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $gmail_url);
// not sure how to set this option
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, $login_url);

$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

echo $output;

Answer 1

I suspect you are trying to access a secure protocol (https) using file_get_contents. For this to work, you should have authentication and openssl extension uncommented in php.ini file. Otherwise the file_get_contents would raise an error that it could not locate the file/url.

Answer 2

You could try using libgmailer http://gmail-lite.sourceforge.net/wordpress/index.php/about/libgmailer/

Answer 3

Enable imap on gmail and use the old fashion php imap library.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75725
http://php.net/manual/en/book.imap.php