how to download mails attachment to a specific folder using IMAP and php

Question

i am developing a site in which users can mail tickets and attach any type of files to a specific mail id. I need to add the mail subject, content and attachment to the database. I am doing this using cron. Except the attachments every thing works perfect. I have seen some post which create download links. Since i am using cron i can't do it manually.

        $hostname = '{xxxx.net:143/novalidate-cert}INBOX';
        $username = 'yyy@xxxx.net';
        $password = 'zzzz';
        /* try to connect */
        $inbox = imap_open($hostname,$username,$password) or die('Cannot connect to : ' . imap_last_error());
        $emails = imap_search($inbox,'ALL');

                if($emails) {
          $output = '';
          rsort($emails);
          foreach($emails as $email_number) {
            $structure = imap_fetchstructure($inbox, $email_number); 
            $name = $structure->parts[1]->dparameters[0]->value; // name of the file
            $type = $structure->parts[1]->type; //type of the file 
}}

I am able to get type and name of the files but don't know how to proceed further

Any one please help me. thank you...

Answer 1

To save attachments as files, you need to parse the structure of the message and take out all parts that are attachments on it's own (content disposition). You should wrap that into classes of their own so you have an easy access and you can handle errors more easily over time, email parsing can be fragile:

$savedir = __DIR__ . '/imap-dump/';

$inbox = new IMAPMailbox($hostname, $username, $password);
$emails = $inbox->search('ALL');
if ($emails) {
    rsort($emails);
    foreach ($emails as $email) {
        foreach ($email->getAttachments() as $attachment) {
            $savepath = $savedir . $attachment->getFilename();
            file_put_contents($savepath, $attachment);
        }
    }
}

The code of these classes is more or less wrapping the imap_... functions, but for the attachment classes, it's doing the parsing of the structures as well. You find the code on github. Hope this is helpful.

Answer 2

Although using PHP + Cron and a standard mail server might work, the amount of work needed to handle all the edge cases, error reporting, etc might not be worth the time. Although I haven't used it, Postmark Inbound seems like an incredible (paid) service that will eliminate most of the headache of processing email via the PHP imap api.

If you want to try to handle everything via PHP, you might want to check this resource out.

Answer 3

In case if you want to download attachments as zip

$zip = new ZipArchive();
$tmp_file = tempnam('.', '');
$zip->open($tmp_file, ZipArchive::CREATE);

$mailbox = $connection->getMailbox('INBOX');
foreach ($mailbox->getMessage() as $message) {
    $attachments = $message->getAttachments();
    foreach ($attachments as $attachment) {
        $zip->addFromString($attachment->getFilename(), $attachment->getDecodedContent());
    }
}

$zip->close();

# send the file to the browser as a download
header('Content-disposition: attachment; filename=download.zip');
header('Content-type: application/zip');
readfile($tmp_file);

This code uses library hosted on GitHub. Hope this is helpful.

Answer 4

Using the email download manager software, you can download emails with attachments on a specific folder to a computer storage location. The software provides an IMAP server option to access your webmail or mail server account easily.