Re: Help Reading from a POP3 Mail Server

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. http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.imap-open.php It's pretty easy and straightforward. On Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 8:56 AM John <john.iliffe@iliffe.ca> 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. :-( > > > > -- regards, Yeni Setiawan http://sandalian.com