Question

Is there any tutorials out on the web that would show how to setup a program that would use piping, PHP and MySQL to setup email where replies would be sent into the database, or something similar to this?

Thank you in advance for any direction in finding out more about this.

Answer 1

PHP and MySQL are both mutually exclusive, and even more so from an email server.

To use PHP to receive email and insert it to a MySQL Database, you would have to write PHP code that is going to connect to a POP3/IMAP box and receive email directly and read new emails, subsequently inserting them into the database for handling them as you wish.

Luckily for you there are a whole host of mail related extensions for PHP. Note that you will specifically want to look at the set of imap_* methods (despite the name, they also work for POP3, etc).

^{I know, you could write your own SMTP server in PHP but who on earth wants to do that?}