Parsing E-mail with PHP

I recently had a need to parse e-mail being piped in from Postfix and insert the exploded headers and message into a database running MS SQL.

It sounds simple enough, and once I started doing some searching, it seems that a ton of people have all sorts of ways of doing this - mostly with PHP.

I tried using Python first, but ended up deciding that PHP was just a better (and simpler) solution for this. Until this week, I had no idea that PHP could be so powerful for SysAdmin type scripting. In fact, before this week, I knew very little about PHP period.

Once I started looking, I found many examples. The thing is, no single example I found worked for me (at least entirely) so I thought I'd share the script that finally did work, in hopes it could help someone else out with a similar problem.

This script assumes you have PHP with the MS SQL extensions as well as FreeTDS installed.

Here is the script:



The script accepts e-mail via STDIN, so to test the script itself you can create a 'sample' e-mail file such as this:





Then you can place your sample emailfile in the same directory as your PHP script and then use cat to pipe the e-mail file to PHP like this: cat emailfile | postfix.php After that configure Postfix to forward all mail to your PHP script, and you are all set. I'll cover the Postfix configuration in a seperate post.