imap

PHP IMAP library

A PHP IMAP library to read and process e-mails over IMAP protocol, built with robust Object-Oriented architecture.

This library requires PHP >= 8.3 with IMAP, iconv and Multibyte String extensions installed.

Installation

The recommended way to install the IMAP library is through Composer:

$ composer require ddeboer/imap

This command requires you to have Composer installed globally, as explained in the installation chapter of the Composer documentation.

Usage

Connect and Authenticate

use DdeboerImapServer;$server = new Server('imap.gmail.com');// $connection is instance of DdeboerImapConnection$connection = $server->authenticate('my_username', 'my_password');

You can specify port, flags and parameters to the server:

$server = new Server($hostname, // required$port,     // defaults to '993'$flags,    // defaults to '/imap/ssl/validate-cert'$parameters);

Mailboxes

Retrieve mailboxes (also known as mail folders) from the mail server and iterate over them:

$mailboxes = $connection->getMailboxes();foreach ($mailboxes as $mailbox) {// Skip container-only mailboxes// @see https://secure.php.net/manual/en/function.imap-getmailboxes.phpif ($mailbox->getAttributes() & LATT_NOSELECT) {continue;
    }// $mailbox is instance of DdeboerImapMailboxprintf('Mailbox "%s" has %s messages', $mailbox->getName(), $mailbox->count());
}

Or retrieve a specific mailbox:

$mailbox = $connection->getMailbox('INBOX');

Delete a mailbox:

$connection->deleteMailbox($mailbox);

You can bulk set, or clear, any flag of mailbox messages (by UIDs):

$mailbox->setFlag('Seen Flagged', ['1:5', '7', '9']);$mailbox->setFlag('Seen', '1,3,5,6:8');$mailbox->clearFlag('Flagged', '1,3');

WARNING You must retrieve new Message instances in case of bulk modify flags to refresh the single Messages flags.

Messages

Retrieve messages (e-mails) from a mailbox and iterate over them:

$messages = $mailbox->getMessages();foreach ($messages as $message) {// $message is instance of DdeboerImapMessage}

To insert a new message (that just has been sent) into the Sent mailbox and flag it as seen:

$mailbox = $connection->getMailbox('Sent');$mailbox->addMessage($messageMIME, 'Seen');

Note that the message should be a string at MIME format (as described in the RFC2045).

Searching for Messages

use DdeboerImapSearchExpression;use DdeboerImapSearchEmailTo;use DdeboerImapSearchTextBody;$search = new SearchExpression();$search->addCondition(new To('[email protected]'));$search->addCondition(new Body('contents'));$messages = $mailbox->getMessages($search);

WARNING We are currently unable to have both spaces and double-quotes escaped together. Only spaces are currently escaped correctly. You can use DdeboerImapSearchRawExpression to write the complete search condition by yourself.

Messages can also be retrieved sorted as per imap_sort function:

$today = new DateTimeImmutable();$thirtyDaysAgo = $today->sub(new DateInterval('P30D'));$messages = $mailbox->getMessages(new DdeboerImapSearchDateSince($thirtyDaysAgo),SORTDATE, // Sort criteriatrue // Descending order);

Unknown search criterion: OR

Note that PHP imap library relies on the c-client library available at https://www.washington.edu/imap/ which doesn't fully support some IMAP4 search criteria like OR. If you want those unsupported criteria, you need to manually patch the latest version (imap-2007f of 23-Jul-2011 at the time of this commit) and recompile PHP onto your patched c-client library.

By the way most of the common search criteria are available and functioning, browse them in ./src/Search.

References:

1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36356715/imap-search-unknown-search-criterion-or

2. imap-2007f.tar.gz: ./src/c-client/mail.c and ./docs/internal.txt

Message Properties and Operations

Get message number and unique message id in the form <...>:

$message->getNumber();$message->getId();

Get other message properties:

$message->getSubject();$message->getFrom();    // MessageEmailAddress$message->getTo();      // array of MessageEmailAddress$message->getDate();    // DateTimeImmutable$message->isAnswered();$message->isDeleted();$message->isDraft();$message->isSeen();

Get message headers as a DdeboerImapMessageHeaders object:

$message->getHeaders();

Get message body as HTML or plain text (only first part):

$message->getBodyHtml();    // Content of text/html part, if present$message->getBodyText();    // Content of text/plain part, if present

Get complete body (all parts):

$body = $message->getCompleteBodyHtml();    // Content of text/html part, if presentif ($body === null) { // If body is null, there are no HTML parts, so let's try getting the text body$body = $message->getCompleteBodyText();    // Content of text/plain part, if present}

Reading the message body keeps the message as unseen. If you want to mark the message as seen:

$message->markAsSeen();

Or you can set, or clear, any flag:

$message->setFlag('Seen Flagged');$message->clearFlag('Flagged');

Move a message to another mailbox:

$mailbox = $connection->getMailbox('another-mailbox');$message->move($mailbox);

Deleting messages:

$mailbox->getMessage(1)->delete();$mailbox->getMessage(2)->delete();$connection->expunge();

Message Attachments

Get message attachments (both inline and attached) and iterate over them:

$attachments = $message->getAttachments();foreach ($attachments as $attachment) {// $attachment is instance of DdeboerImapMessageAttachment}

Download a message attachment to a local file:

// getDecodedContent() decodes the attachment’s contents automatically:file_put_contents('/my/local/dir/' . $attachment->getFilename(),$attachment->getDecodedContent()
);

Embedded Messages

Check if attachment is embedded message and get it:

$attachments = $message->getAttachments();foreach ($attachments as $attachment) {if ($attachment->isEmbeddedMessage()) {$embeddedMessage = $attachment->getEmbeddedMessage();// $embeddedMessage is instance of DdeboerImapMessageEmbeddedMessage}
}

An EmbeddedMessage has the same API as a normal Message, apart from flags and operations like copy, move or delete.

Timeouts

The IMAP extension provides the imap_timeout function to adjust the timeout seconds for various operations.

However the extension's implementation doesn't link the functionality to a specific context or connection, instead they are global. So in order to not affect functionalities outside this library, we had to choose whether wrap every imap_* call around an optional user-provided timeout or leave this task to the user.

Because of the heterogeneous world of IMAP servers and the high complexity burden cost for such a little gain of the former, we chose the latter.

Mock the library

Mockability is granted by interfaces present for each API. Dig into MockabilityTest for an example of a mocked workflow.

Contributing: run the build locally

Docker is needed to run the build on your computer.

First command you need to run is make start-imap-server, which starts an IMAP server locally.

Then the local build can be triggered with a bare make.

When you finish the development, stop the local IMAP server with make stop-imap-server.