Question

I’m trying to build a small webmail app. When I read all the emails in inbox I want to show for each mail if it has attachments. This works, but the problem is that it takes to long to do that, about 0.5 secs for 1Mb email attach. Multiply that with all emails in inbox that have big attach files 😐
My question is: How to check if an email has attach withouth loading the whole email ? Is that possible ?
Bellow is the code I’m using now:

function existAttachment($part)
 { 
  if (isset($part->parts))
  { 
   foreach ($part->parts as $partOfPart)
   { 
    $this->existAttachment($partOfPart); 
   } 
  } 
  else
  { 
   if (isset($part->disposition))
   { 
    if ($part->disposition == 'attachment')
    { 
     echo '<p>' . $part->dparameters[0]->value . '</p>'; 
     // here you can create a link to the file whose name is  $part->dparameters[0]->value to download it 
     return true; 
    }   
   } 
  } 
  return false;
 }

 function hasAttachments($msgno)
 {
  $struct = imap_fetchstructure($this->_connection,$msgno,FT_UID); 
  $existAttachments = $this->existAttachment($struct);

  return $existAttachments;
 }

Answer 1

imap_fetchstructure does fetch the whole email content in order to analyze it. Sadly there is no other way to check for attachment.

Maybe you can use the message size info from imap_headerinfo to get a prediction if the message will have attachments.

Another way is to fetch the emails in an regular interval in the background and store them with their content and UID for later lookup in a database. You need to do that later anyway when you want so search for specific messages. (You do not want to scan the while imap account when searching for “dinner”)