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Asked: 2026-05-10T16:19:21+00:00

I’ve been battling PHP’s email reading functions for the better part of two days.

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I’ve been battling PHP’s email reading functions for the better part of two days. I’m writing a script to read emails from a mailbox and save any attachments onto the server. If you’ve ever done something similar, you might understand my pain: PHP doesn’t play well with email!

I’ve connected to the POP3 server and I can iterate the files. Here’s a rough outline of the code:

if (!$mbox = imap_open ('{myserver.com:110/pop3/notls}INBOX', 'u', 'p'))     die ('Cannot connect/check mail! Exiting');  if ($hdr = imap_check($mbox))      $msgCount = $hdr->Nmsgs; else      die ('Failed to get mail');  foreach ($overview as $message) {     $msgStruct = imap_fetchstructure($mbox, $message->msgno);      // if it has parts, there are attachments that need reading     if ($msgStruct->parts) {         foreach ($msgStruct->parts as $key => $part) {             switch (strtoupper($part->subtype)) {                 case 'GIF': case 'JPEG':case 'PNG':                      //do something - but what?!                      break;             }         }     } }

I’ve marked where I’m stuck. I can use imap_fetchbody($mbox, $message->msgno, $key+1) but that gets me a bunch of data like this:

/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD/2wBDAAUDBAQEAwUEBAQFBQUGBwwIBwcHBw8LCwkMEQ8S EhEPERETFhwXExQaFRERGCEYGh0dHx8fExciJCIeJBweHx7/2wBDAQUFBQcGBw4ICA4eFBEU Hh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh4eHh7/wAAR CAHiAi0DASIAAhEBAxEB/8QAHwAAAQUBAQEBAQEAAAAAAAAAAAECAwQFBgcICQoL/8QAtRAA AgEDAwIEAwUFBAQAAAF9AQIDAAQRBRIhMUEGE1FhByJxFDKBkaEII0KxwRVS0fAkM2JyggkK FhcYGRolJicoKSo0NTY3ODk6Q0RFRkdISUpTVFVWV1hZWmNkZWZnaGlqc3R1dnd4eXqDhIWG h4iJipKTlJWWl5iZmqKjpKWmp6ipqrKztLW2t7i5usLDxMXGx8jJytLT1NXW19jZ2uHi4+Tl 5ufo6erx8vP09fb3+Pn6/8QAHwEAAwEBAQEBAQEBAQAAAAAAAAECAwQFBgcICQoL/8QAtREA ...

I’m lead to believe that this is MIME data. I need it as an image! I’ve seen several classes bombing around the internet that claim to do the required wizardry. I can’t get any of them to work. I don’t understand why I’m finding this so hard!

In short, I’m looking for something that can turn a raw MIME string into real data.

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1 Answer

  1. I found a quick guide how to treat emails with PHP: here.

    At the bottom of that page there’s a attachment-body echo:

    if (substr($ContentType,0,4) == 'text') { echo imap_qprint($fileContent); } else { echo imap_base64($fileContent); }

    I guess this is what you might need…

    (edit: in your case if it’s image always you can skip the if part. And of course, save the file instead of echoing it:)

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