connect email server to a web server

[kzar]

Hi all, and sorry if this is the wrong place to ask the following question.

I am building an application where an operator and and a user will be able to communicate to each other with their own control panels (through forms mostly).

A situation has arise where the operator must send an actual real email to the user (meaning that the user will receive it to his inbox raher than to my application inbox). And when the user replies to the operator, comes my problems.

How can i grab the email from the email server (assuming that the user has press " the reply button"),
and store it to my application's database (php, mysql, apache)?

If such a process can be performed, how is it called? How can i search/research/learn more on this?

[kzar]

I found this http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.imap.php in php manual. Seems it will help me in my problem.

What do you think?

[falko]

You can do it with procmail. Put a file .procmailrc in the receiver's homedir which looks like this:

PATH="/usr/bin:$PATH:/usr/local/bin"
SHELL=/bin/sh
:0 c
* ^TO.*example@example.com
| wget -O /dev/null http://www.example.com/yourscript.php
Replace example@example.com with the receiver's email address. Now when a mail arrives, it will be passed to http://www.example.com/yourscript.php.