Hi John,
I'm wondering why didn't you use IMAP functionality to access POP3 server? Despite its name, it can be used to access POP3 too.
It's pretty easy and straightforward.
On Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 8:56 AM John <john.iliffe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I am trying to get e-mails one at a time from a pop3 mail server. I can open
the pop3 socket on port 110 using
fsockopen(tcp://127.0.0.1, 110, $errno, $errstr)
and I have no problem logging on to the mail account and issuing the LIST and
RETR commands.
BUT getting the actual email has me stumped. Using fgets() works OK IF I can
tell it how many lines to expect. If not, it runs off the end of the file and I
have to cancel the job manually. If I use the code in the fread() documentation
it does the same thing:
$message = "";
while (! feof($mail_sock))
{
$message .= fread($mail_sock, 8192);
}
hangs at the end of the email and I need to cancel manually. Putting an echo
command right after the fread() statement shows that the entire message arrives
correctly before it hangs.
I have tried checking for the ".\r\n" standard pop3 EOF indicator and breaking
out of the while loop when I find it but that is unstable, that combination
occurred during testing in a random email. Same thing happened using fgets()
before I started trying fread().
For completeness, stream_get_contents($mail_sock, 8192) also fails with the same
overrun problem and I can't see the actual data to set an EOF trap.
I thought maybe the problem would be that the socket was blocking so I framed
the fread() call as:
stream_set_blocking($mail_sock, false);
while (! feof($mail_sock))
{
$message .= fread($mail_sock, 8192);
echo "\n" . $message;
}
stream_set_blocking($mail_sock, true);
This results in a runaway read of the same email over and over and the programme
needs to be cancelled manually. Obviously, the feof() command is inactive in
this situation but I don't know why. (bug???)
However, if I remove the while loop and run it, I sometimes get the first line
of the email and sometimes nothing; that is, the fread() command doesn't wait
for the server to respond.
One workaround that I found was to set the socket timeout to a fairly short
value and most of the time this works. Unfortunately the server occasionally
doesn't respond within the short timeout and the e-mail is truncated. Longer
timeouts (like 30 seconds) create throughput problems for the application.
At a guess, I suspect that the pop3 server doesn't send any indication at the
end of each e-mail, just stops sending, but I can't prove that and I can't think
of a reliable way to deal with it.
Does anyone have any suggestions? I've been playing with this for quite a while
without any success. :-(
