Retrieving e-mail messages using PHP from Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo via POP3 - POP3 e-mail client package blog

Contents

Gmail and Google App Accounts

Hotmail and Windows Live accounts

Yahoo! Mail

Other Web mail systems

Retrieving only the new unread messages

Processing retrieved e-mail messages

Gmail and Google App Accounts

Before retrieving messages from Gmail accounts, you need to enable POP support for your account. You can do that by going to the settings page, click on the tab named Forwarding and POP/IMAP, and enable one of the POP options that exposes the messages in your mailbox either since ever or only from now on.

Gmail POP3 server responds in the port 995 and it requires that you enable SSL/TLS encryption. The user name must be the account e-mail address including the domain part.

 $pop3 = new pop3_class;
 $pop3->hostname = "pop.gmail.com";
 $pop3->port = 995;
 $pop3->tls = 1;
 $user = "account@gmail.com";
 $password = "account password";

Hotmail and Windows Live accounts

Accessing Hotmail accounts is similar to Gmail, except that it does not need to explicitly enable POP support in the Web interface.

 $pop3 = new pop3_class;
 $pop3->hostname = "pop3.live.com";
 $pop3->port = 995;
 $pop3->tls = 1;
 $user = "account@hotmail.com";
 $password = "account password";

Yahoo! Mail

Currently, accessing Yahoo! Mail mailbox messages via POP3 is restricted to paying users of the Yahoo! Mail plus service. Other than that, most parameters are similar to Gmail and Hotmail, except that the user name should be just the account user name, thus without the @ character and the domain name.

 $pop3 = new pop3_class;
 $pop3->hostname = "pop.mail.yahoo.com";
 $pop3->port = 995;
 $pop3->tls = 1;
 $user = "account";
 $password = "account password";

Other Web mail systems

Retrieving only the new unread messages

Some applications retrieve e-mail messages from a mailbox via POP3 but do not delete the messages. Therefore they cannot easily determine if the message was already retrieved or is new.

Unfortunately, the POP3 protocol does not provide a way to determine which messages in a mailbox are new or were already retrieved in a previous access.

One way to solve this problem is to keep track of the message identifiers of the messages read so far, for instance storing those identifiers in a database.

The POP3 class ListMessage function can list all the messages if you pass an empty string as first parameter. If you pass the value 1 as second parameter, it will return an array with the unique identifier of all messages.

If you lookup your database of previously retrieved messages and compare with the unique identifiers of the messages in the POP3 mailbox, you can easily determine which messages are new by finding the unique identifiers of messages not present in your database.

This is not a very efficient solution if you have many messages in your mailbox, so it may take a while, but at least it is a solution that works when you retrieve messages via POP3.

Processing retrieved e-mail messages

Once you retrieve the new messages, you need to process them eventually parsing the messages to extract their information. That is a task that can be easily achieved using a separate PHP MIME message parser class in conjunction with the POP3 class.

That is a subject that was already covered in a past post of this blog about processing incoming mail messages using PHP.

If you have doubts or questions about how to achieve other purposes with this class that you would like to be covered in eventual posts of this blog, feel free to post a comment to this article.