UPDATE:

This script can now be found on GitHub. https://github.com/stuporglue/mailreader

One of most popular pages of all time is Recieve E-mail and Save Attachments with a PHP script. What was meant to be a quick hack that was only ever tested with Gmail ended up generating lots of support requests.

At first I suggested that people needed more robust email parsing use a dedicated library. But no one seemed to want to do the coding for that, so I ended up writing a new version which uses the PEAR mimeDecode.php library to do the parsing.

Without further ado, here’s mailReader.php!

E-mail Processing Script Features:

1. Saves the e-mail sender, subject and body to a database
2. Saves any attachments as files and creates an entry for those files in the database, associated with the e-mail info in #1
3. Sends  a response back to the sender telling them what files were received and their file sizes
4. Checks a list of allowed senders to make sure we only take files from specified addresses.

Database Setup:

If you’re going to use the database features, you’ll need a database. Here’s the SQL to create an identical setup to the one I have:

-- Here's my DB structureCREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `emails` (
  `id` int(255) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `from` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `subject` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `body` text COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `date` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00' ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `files` (
  `id` int(255) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `email_id` int(255) NOT NULL,
  `filename` varchar(255) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `size` varchar(20) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  `mime` varchar(100) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

Security

Make sure that your upload directory is out of your webroot. If someone emails you a malicious PHP script (eg. Virus.php) and can access it via the web, they could infect your server or your visitors. Many servers are configured to automatically treat .pl and .cgi as CGI scripts and run them as well. You do not want to create a way for untrusted users to upload files to your webroot!

With the file names in the database you can use Readfile to pass files down to users.

The Script: mailReader.php

Download it here.

#!/usr/bin/php -q
<?php
//  Use -q so that php doesn't print out the HTTP headers

/*
 * mailReader.php
 *
 * Recieve mail and attachments with PHP
 *
 * Usage:
 * This script expects to recieve raw emails via STDIN.
 *
 * Configure your mail server to pipe emails to this script. (See
 * http://stuporglue.org/add-an-email-address-that-forwards-to-a-script/
 * for instructions).  Make this script executable, and edit the
 * configuration options to suit your needs. Change permissions
 * of the directories so that the user executing the script (probably the
 * mail user) will have write permission to the file upload directory.
 *
 * By default the script is configured to save pdf, zip, jpg, png and gif files.
 * Edit the switch statements around line 200 to change this.
 *
 * Requirements:
 * You will need mimeDecode.php from http://pear.php.net/package/Mail_mimeDecode/
 * I used version 1.5.5
 *
 * Copyright 2012, Michael Moore
 * Licensed under the same terms as PHP itself. You are free to use this script
 * for personal or commercial projects. Use at your own risk. No guarantees or
 * warranties.
 *
 * Contact:
 * <[email protected]>
 * http://stuporglue.org
 *
 * Support:
 * Limited free support available in the comments on the webpage for this script
 * or via email. Contracted support available for specific projects.
 * http://stuporglue.org/mailreader-php-parse-e-mail-and-save-attachments-php-version-2/
 *
 * Thanks:
 * Many thanks to forahobby of www.360-hq.com for testing this script and helping me find
 * the initial bugs.
 * Thanks to Craig Hopson of twitterrooms.co.uk for help tracking down an iOS email handling bug.
 */

global $save_directory,$saved_files,$debug,$body;

/*
 *
 * 	Configuration Options
 *
 */

// What's the max # of seconds to try to process an email?
$max_time_limit = 600; 

// A safe place for files WITH TRAILING SLASH
// Malicious users could upload a php or executable file,
// so keep this out of your web root
$save_directory = "/a/safe/save/directory/";

// Allowed senders is now just the email part of the sender (no name part)
$allowed_senders = Array(
    '[email protected]',
    '[email protected]',
); 

// Send confirmation e-mail back to sender?
$send_email = FALSE; 

// Save e-mail message and file list to DB?
$save_msg_to_db = FALSE; 

// Configure your MySQL database connection here
$db_host = 'localhost';
$db_un = 'db_un';
$db_pass = 'db_pass';
$db_name = 'db_name';

$debug = FALSE;

/*
 *
 * 	End of Configuration Options
 *
 */

//Anything printed to STDOUT will be sent back to the sender as an error!
//error_reporting(-1);
//ini_set("display_errors", 1);

// Initialize the other global, set PHP options, load email library
$saved_files = Array();
set_time_limit($max_time_limit);
ini_set('max_execution_time',$max_time_limit);
require_once('mimeDecode.php');

// Some functions we'll use
function formatBytes($bytes, $precision = 2) {
    $units = array('B', 'KB', 'MB', 'GB', 'TB');

    $bytes = max($bytes, 0);
    $pow = floor(($bytes ? log($bytes) : 0) / log(1024));
    $pow = min($pow, count($units) - 1);

    $bytes /= pow(1024, $pow);

    return round($bytes, $precision) . ' ' . $units[$pow];
} 

// Find a happy place! Find a happy place!
function saveFile($filename,$contents,$mimeType){
    global $save_directory,$saved_files,$debug;
    $filename = preg_replace('/[^a-zA-Z0-9_-]/','_',$filename);

    $unlocked_and_unique = FALSE;
    while(!$unlocked_and_unique){
	// Find unique
	$name = time() . "_" . $filename;
	while(file_exists($save_directory . $name)) {
	    $name = time() . "_" . $filename;
	}

	// Attempt to lock
	$outfile = fopen($save_directory.$name,'w');
	if(flock($outfile,LOCK_EX)){
	    $unlocked_and_unique = TRUE;
	}else{
	    flock($outfile,LOCK_UN);
	    fclose($outfile);
	}
    }

    fwrite($outfile,$contents);
    fclose($outfile);

    // This is for readability for the return e-mail and in the DB
    $saved_files[$name] = Array(
	'size' => formatBytes(filesize($save_directory.$name)),
	'mime' => $mimeType
    );
}

function decodePart($body_part){
    global $body,$debug;
    if(array_key_exists('name',$body_part->ctype_parameters)){ // everyone else I've tried
	$filename = $body_part->ctype_parameters['name'];
    }else if($body_part->ctype_parameters && array_key_exists('filename',$body_part->ctype_parameters)){ // hotmail
	$filename = $body_part->ctype_parameters['filename'];
    }else{
	$filename = "file";
    }

    if($debug){
	print "Found body part type {$body_part->ctype_primary}/{$body_part->ctype_secondary}\n";
    }

    $mimeType = "{$body_part->ctype_primary}/{$body_part->ctype_secondary}"; 

    switch($body_part->ctype_primary){
    case 'text':
	switch($body_part->ctype_secondary){
	case 'plain':
	    $body = $body_part->body; // If there are multiple text/plain parts, we will only get the last one.
	    break;
	}
	break;
    case 'application':
	switch ($body_part->ctype_secondary){
	case 'pdf': // save these file types
	case 'zip':
	case 'octet-stream':
	    saveFile($filename,$body_part->body,$mimeType);
	    break;
	default:
	    // anything else (exe, rar, etc.) will faill into this hole and die
	    break;
	}
	break;
    case 'image':
	switch($body_part->ctype_secondary){
	case 'jpeg': // Save these image types
	case 'png':
	case 'gif':
	    saveFile($filename,$body_part->body,$mimeType);
	    break;
	default:
	    break;
	}
	break;
    case 'multipart':
	if(is_array($body_part->parts)){
	    foreach($body_part->parts as $ix => $sub_part){
		decodePart($sub_part);
	    }
	}
	break;
    default:
	// anything else isn't handled
	break;
    }
}

//
// Actual email handling starts here!
// 

// Process the e-mail from stdin
$fd = fopen('php://stdin','r');
$raw = '';
while(!feof($fd)){ $raw .= fread($fd,1024); }

// Uncomment this for debugging.
// Then you can do
// cat /my/saved/file.raw | ./mailReader.php
// for testing
//file_put_contents("$save_directory/" . time() . "_email.raw",$raw);

// Now decode it!
// http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail-mimedecode.decode.php
$decoder = new Mail_mimeDecode($raw);
$decoded = $decoder->decode(
    Array(
	'decode_headers' => TRUE,
	'include_bodies' => TRUE,
	'decode_bodies' => TRUE,
    )
);

// Set $from_email and check if it's allowed
$from = $decoded->headers['from'];
$from_email = preg_replace('/.*<(.*)>.*/',"$1",$from);
if(!in_array($from_email,$allowed_senders)){
    die("$from_email not an allowed sender");
}

// Set the $subject
$subject = $decoded->headers['subject'];

// Find the email body, and any attachments
// $body_part->ctype_primary and $body_part->ctype_secondary make up the mime type eg. text/plain or text/html
if(is_array($decoded->parts)){
    foreach($decoded->parts as $idx => $body_part){
	decodePart($body_part);
    }
}

// $from_email, $subject and $body should be set now. $saved_files should have
// the files we captured

// Put the results in the database if needed
if($save_msg_to_db){
    mysql_connect($db_host,$db_un,$db_pass);
    mysql_select_db($db_name);

    $q = "INSERT INTO `emails` (`from`,`subject`,`body`) VALUES ('" .
	mysql_real_escape_string($from_email) . "','" .
	mysql_real_escape_string($subject) . "','" .
	mysql_real_escape_string($body) . "')";

    mysql_query($q) or die(mysql_error());

    if(count($saved_files) > 0){
	$id = mysql_insert_id();
	$q = "INSERT INTO `files` (`email_id`,`filename`,`size`,`mime`) VALUES ";
	$filesar = Array();
	foreach($saved_files as $f => $data){
	    $filesar[] = "('$id','" .
		mysql_real_escape_string($f) . "','" .
		mysql_real_escape_string($data['size']) . "','" .
		mysql_real_escape_string($data['mime']) . "')";
	}
	$q .= implode(', ',$filesar);
	mysql_query($q) or die(mysql_error());
    }
}

// Send response e-mail if needed
if($send_email && $from_email != ""){
    $to = $from_email;
    $newmsg = "Thanks! I just uploaded the following ";
    $newmsg .= "files to your storage:\n\n";
    $newmsg .= "Filename -- Size\n";
    foreach($saved_files as $f => $s){
	$newmsg .= "$f -- $s\n";
    }
    $newmsg .= "\nI hope everything looks right. If not,";
    $newmsg .=  "please send me an e-mail!\n";

    mail($to,$subject,$newmsg);
}

if($debug){
    print "From : $from_email\n";
    print "Subject : $subject\n";
    print "Body : $body\n";
    print "Saved Files : \n";
    print_r($saved_files);
}

Thanks

Many thanks to forahobby for testing this script and helping me squash a bunch of little bugs. Thanks to Craig Hopson for his help finding a problem handling emails from iOS devices.