Question

I am using imap_xxx to access emails for my website, we need to discard all emails which are system non-human generated like out of office, autoreply, mail-bounce, error etc. Need to write a code for the same in PHP.

Code pointer would be appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

A few regexes you could apply to the envelope sender (“Return-Path” header) to check for automated senders:

"^owner-",
"^request-",
"-request@",
"bounce.*@",
"-confirm@",
"-errors@",
"^no[\-]?reply",
"^donotreply",
"^postmaster@",
"^mailer[-_]daemon@",
"^mailer@",
"^listserv@",
"^majordom[o]?@",
"^mailman@",
"^nobody@",
"^bounce",
"^www(-data)?@",
"^mdaemon@",
"^root@",
"^webmaster@",
"^news(letter)?@",
"^administrator@", #role accounts, maybe you want these
"^support@", 

headers that indicate automated sender if they exist:

 "list-help",
 "list-unsubscribe", 
 "list-subscribe", 
 "list-owner", 
 "list-post", 
 "list-archive", 
 "list-id", 
 "mailing-List",
 "x-facebook-notify",
 "x-mailing-list",
 'x-cron-env',
 'x-autoresponse',
 'x-eBay-mailtracker'

headers that indicate an automated sender if they match a certain regex:

'x-spam-flag':'yes',
'x-spam-status':'yes',
'precedence':'(bulk|list|junk)',
'x-precedence':'(bulk|list|junk)',
'x-barracuda-spam-status':'yes',
'x-dspam-result':'(spam|bl[ao]cklisted)',
'X-Mailer':'^Mail$',
'auto-submitted':'auto-replied',
'X-Auto-Response-Suppress':'(AutoReply|OOF)',