Question

I have a dedicated server with MediaTemple. I’m searching for an efficient way to create email aliases programmatically in PHP.

The server has Plesk installed so I originally thought I could use the Plesk CLI to create an email alias that piped to a PHP script, but the only method I’ve found with the CLI is to create an email account.

My ideal situation is:

PHP script progammatically creates an email alias that forwards to a PHP script that handles email piping.

What I would like to know is some of the accepted methods of doing this. For instance facebook allows you to create a facebook email account alias that you can use to update your status and post photos by just sending an email to that account.

Thanks

Answer 1

I’ve done this, but not with Plesk.

You should be able to add aliases to your /etc/aliases file, then you might need to run newaliases as a user with the correct privileges (I’ve done this as root; maybe you could cron it).

The alias would look something like this:

aliasname: "|/path/to/mailhandler.php"

mailhandler.php needs to be +x (chmod), and should probably start with #!/usr/bin/env php; from there you can read from the php://stdin stream and parse the headers and/or body to do what you need.