Check your email with PHP and IMAP

At some point I wanted to check if there was any unread messages in a couple mailboxes from inside an website administration panel, so I ended up with a simple script like the one described here. What we want is to fetch the all the messages in the INBOX of each e-mail account for the past week, using the IMAP functions of PHP. Also, we are going to mark the unread messages with a different style.

WARNING: This is only an example on how to use some PHP IMAP functions.
It is NOT recommended to store your passwords in an unencoded php file on a shared server.

Create an array of your mailboxes

<?
// Configure your imap mailboxes
$mailboxes = array(
    array(
        'label'     => 'Gmail',
        'mailbox'   => '{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl}INBOX',
        'username'  => 'yourusername@gmail.com',
        'password'  => 'yourpassword'
    ),
    array(
        'label'     => 'My Cpanel website',
        'mailbox'   => '{mail.yourdomain.com:143/notls}INBOX',
        'username'  => 'info+yourdomain.com',
        'password'  => 'yourpassword'
    ),
    array(
        'label'     => 'Another mail account',
        'mailbox'   => '{mail.yourdomain.com:143/notls}INBOX',
        'username'  => 'info@yourdomain.com',
        'password'  => 'yourpassword'
    )
);
?>

Fetch this week's messages from each mailbox

<div id="mailboxes">
<?
foreach ($mailboxes as $current_mailbox) {
?>
    <div class="mailbox">
    <h2><?=$current_mailbox['label']?></h2>
    <?      
    // Open an IMAP stream to our mailbox
    $stream = @imap_open($current_mailbox['mailbox'], $current_mailbox['username'], $current_mailbox['password']);
    
    if (!$stream) { 
    ?>
        <p>Could not connect to: <?=$current_mailbox['label']?>. Error: <?=imap_last_error()?></p>
    <?
    } else {
        // Get our messages from the last week
        $emails = imap_search($stream, 'SINCE '. date('d-M-Y',strtotime("-1 week")));

        // Instead of searching for this week's messages, you could search 
        // for all the messages in your inbox using: $emails = imap_search($stream, 'ALL');
        
        if (!count($emails)){
        ?>
            <p>No e-mails found.</p>
        <?
        } else {

            // If we've got some email IDs, sort them from new to old and show them
            rsort($emails);
            
            foreach($emails as $email_id){
            
                // Fetch the email's overview and show subject, from and date. 
                $overview = imap_fetch_overview($stream,$email_id,0);                       
                ?>
                <div class="email_item clearfix <?=$overview[0]->seen?'read':'unread'?>"> <!-- add a different class for seperating read and unread e-mails -->
                    <span class="subject"><?=$overview[0]->subject?></span>
                    <span class="from"><?=$overview[0]->from?></span>
                    <span class="date"><?=$overview[0]->date?></span>
                </div>
                <?
            } 
        } 

        // Close our imap stream.
        imap_close($stream); 
    }
    ?>
    </div>
<?
} // end foreach 
?>
</div>

Decoding MIME extensions

Add the following function in order to decode headers that may contain non ASCII text. For example "=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Keld_J=F8rn_Simonsen?=" should print "Keld Jørn Simonsen"

<?
// A function to decode MIME message header extensions and get the text
function decode_imap_text($str){
    $result = '';
    $decode_header = imap_mime_header_decode($str);
    foreach ($decode_header AS $obj) {
        $result .= htmlspecialchars(rtrim($obj->text, "\t"));
    }
    return $result;
}
?>

and change the output part to:

<div class="email_item clearfix <?=$overview[0]->seen?'read':'unread'?>"> 
    <span class="subject"><?=decode_imap_text($overview[0]->subject)?></span>
    <span class="from"><?=decode_imap_text($overview[0]->from)?></span>
    <span class="date"><?=$overview[0]->date?></span>
</div>

That's all - regarding PHP. Try putting it all together, adding some CSS and some icons for read/unread messages, and you will come out with something like this demo page, or download all the files of the demo.

What else?

You could go a step further and get the message body with imap_fetchbody(), or add the functionality to mark a message as "read" or "unread". This could be as simple as this:

imap_setflag_full($stream,$email_id, "\\Seen"); // Set the flag "Seen" 
imap_clearflag_full($stream,$email_id,'\\Unseen'); // Clear the flag "Unseen"