Building A PHP-Based Mail Client (part 2) - Miles To Go (
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At this point, I'm fairly
pleased with myself. I've succeeded in writing a fully-functional POP3 mail
reader, one which is capable of connecting to any POP3 server, retrieving
messages from it, and handling MIME-compliant attachments gracefully. Sure, it's
not perfect - I've noticed problems with certain types of messages - but those
are easily handled by appropriate additions to the parse() function, or by
additional checks in "view.php", and you may even decide to ignore them if
you're happy with the way the program currently works.
Hopefully, you've
also learned a lot more about PHP's IMAP functions. This article introduced you
to a few more important pieces of the puzzle, demonstrating how PHP's IMAP
functions allow you to obtain detailed structural information on an email
message, and extract individual segments from it for further processing. It also
provided a crash course on MIME, using examples and theory to set the base for a
practical implementation of MIME-based attachment handling.
We're now a
lot closer to the end of this case study - all that's left is to write code to
handle the four additional functions of compose, reply, forward and send. Come
back for the final segment of this case study, and find out more about how I
plan to handle these functions, together with a look at the process of
constructing a MIME message and a brief discussion of the error handler used
throughout this article.
Note: All examples in this article have been
tested on Linux/ig86 with Apache 1.3.12 and PHP 4.0.6. Examples are illustrative
only, and are not meant for a production environment. Melonfire provides no
warranties or support for the source code described in this article. YMMV!
