Building A PHP-Based Mail Client (part 2) (
Page 1 of 7 )
Now that you've got a basic mail reader up and running, it's time
to learn a little more about attachments. This second segment analyzes
MIME-encoded attachments, demonstrating how to decode and download them,
and then integrates attachment handling features into the primitive mail
client previously demonstrated.In the first part of this article, I demonstrated the basics of PHP's IMAP
functions, using them to connect to a POP3 server and retrieve a list of
messages from it. I also explained how to extract important message headers,
showed you how to delete selected messages from the server, and gave you a crash
course in PHP's session management functions.
While I have a fairly clear
idea of the requirements for this application, there's still an important hole
in my overall plan - I have not yet written any code to handle message
attachments. This is holding up my implementation, as a number of scripts in the
application will require this capability. And so, my first task today must be to
understand how message attachments work, and write a few generic functions that
allow easy manipulation of these attachments.
In case you don't already
have the source code for the application described in this case study, you can
download it
here.
Let's get
started!
