Question

I am creating a email-to-push service for an iOS app I am developing. I already have the push part of this service using a PHP server that sends APNS messages. Now I need a way to check an email address for new messages and send the contents of each new message via this PHP script.

I am using an Ubuntu server.

Any suggestions of either software or more PHP code that I can use to accomplish this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you use postfix as your MTA, you can easily arrange for a PHP script to be called for e-mail delivery. Inside this PHP script you can do whatever you need: Write the mail to a DB, arrange to push it to the device, whatever.

Add this to postfix master.cf

phpmail    unix  -       n       n       -       10      pipe
  flags= user=www-data argv=/usr/bin/php /path/to/script.php ${recipient}

and this to your main.cf (if you want to deliver ALL local mail through php)

mailbox_transport = phpmail:

This will result in your script being run with the recipient as first argument.

Naturally this will work only, if the email addresses are set up to deliver (at least a copy) to your postfix server.