Question

I have an inbox with 5000+ emails saying that somebody has signed up. Within the body of the email is their email address and name which I want to store in a database.

Q) How can I get this into a database? Ideally mysql.

Ideally I would like to do this in a PHP which I am most familiar with.

I am using iRedMail with: OpenLDAP

UPDATE: since posting the question I have already written the actual email parser using Plan Cake Email Parser, literally took 5 mins once I found this.

UPDATE 2:
To make things easier I have moved all of the emails I want in the database into a separate IMAP folder.

But when I do a search it returns nothing: find /var/vmail -name ‘Subscribers’ -type d –

UPDATE 3:
Another alternative is that I already have the emails downloaded in my email client locally using Thunderbird Windows 7. When I check my Profiles I can see 3 files related to:

1. Subscribers.msf
2. Subscribers-1
3. Subscribers-1.msf

Answer 1

The real tricky part isn’t parsing the emails, but getting the emails from your server. There are three ways I can think of doing this:

1. Use php’s imap library http://php.net/manual/en/book.imap.php. I personally haven’t worked with it very much but since you’re just fetching all emails, it might be useful. The downside is that you’ll end up fetching all of your other mails as well.
2. Use a 3rd-party service to handle the imap and expose your email via a simpler REST interface. Ideally you’d want to search for a key term (maybe “user signed up”) and then parse it.
3. Use offlineimap to download all the emails as a Maildir and store it localy. Now you can use PHP to search all the emails and it’ll be faster and easier to test the version here.

As for parsing, I personally recommend using grep to find the mails that contain the information you want to extract, and awk to convert this information into a CSV file. You can do text processing using PHP but it’s far simpler and cleaner to do it with these tooks.

You can now easily push the data into MySQL.