Receiving / retrieving email in CakePHP

Question

I am developing a basic yet highly customized CRM for a small training centre which has the ability to store student records and also send emails to them. I\'m using SwiftMailer

Answer 1

You will want to pipe your email to PHP and use stdin:// to read the contents of the email and add the e-mail to your database.

I've done this with cake and the simplest way is to make a Cake console application to handle the parsing. Also using cpanel's account level filtering to generate the pipe is really simple.

http://forums.cpanel.net/f5/piping-mail-php-scripts-howto-checklist-50985.html

http://www.evolt.org/incoming_mail_and_php

Answer 2

Sounds like you want to include SwiftMailer as a Cake plugin, amirite?

http://book.cakephp.org/view/1111/Plugins

-- if you want to package it yourself. Otherwise, a cursory search of the Bakery yielded this result:

http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/sky_l3ppard/2009/11/07/updated-swiftmailer-4-xx-component-with-attachments-and-plugins

Hopefully it will at least get you pointed in the right direction. HTH. :)

Answer 3

Thanks to everyone for your answers, but I've been doing some more searching and it looks like the solution is actually incredibly simple.

Basically, with the help of a plugin, I can set up the mail server in databases.php as a datasource and then write a Model and Controller to interact with it.

Here's the example I found: https://github.com/kvz/cakephp-emails-plugin

Edit: the repo has been deprecated and is now available at https://github.com/kvz/deprecated/tree/cakephp-emails-plugin