Question

What I would like is a service (preferably something not installed on a server like just letting a third-party handle e-mails but if a dedicated server is necessary I’ll give it a shot) that allows any e-mails to my site to be redirected as a HTTP request to a php script I specify

For example a e-mail like this

To: [e-mail]
From: [e-mail]
Subject: hello!
Message: Hey man whats up?

Would make a http request to

http://example.com/notify.php

With some POST data:

to=[e-mail]&from=[e-mail]&subject=hello!&message=Hey man whats up?

I’d like to avoid polling every minute as I believe this would be a major drain on the server. Is there any pre-existing mail server or service that has these sort of features? My other plan would be to implement my own mail server but that seems like a huge project to undertake just to support this.

Answer 1

Set up a pipe alias in your MTA:

autoprog:      |myscript.php

At that point you can have your script parse the email and open a URL with it properly encoded into the query string. Or it could just process the email directly.