Cleaning up after an emailing

westworld — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:48:23 +0000

As a web master, I often send out mass mailings. After the mailing is done, the bounced emails are returned to my Outlook. I go through them manually. The real bouncers are put in a “Bounced” folder and, Out of office messages in the “Trash”. The rest of the emails are addresses I need to update in my database or people that wish to unsubscribe. Since sorting through 2000 bouncers can take up a lot of time, I did some research on how to automate this.

PHP offers a set of functions to connect to a mail server (IMAP/POP3). The plan was to let my web server connect to the mail server and sort out the bouncers for me. Below is a little script to give you some ideas of what I came up with.

<?php
// fill in your SERVER, LOG and PAS!
$mbox = imap_open("{SERVER:143}", "LOG", "PAS");

echo "<h1>Mailboxes</h1>\n";
$folders = imap_listmailbox($mbox, "{SERVER:143}", "*");
if($folders == false) {echo "Call failed<br />\n";}
else{
	foreach ($folders as $val) { echo $val . "<br />\n";  }
}

$list = array(); // array will store all bounced email adresses
$result = imap_search($mbox,'SUBJECT "failure notice"'); // find all with subject 'failure notice'
if(!empty($result)){
foreach($result as $msgno) {
    $body = imap_fetchbody($mbox, $msgno,1); // fetch the body of the message
	$find= "To: "; // look for the 'To' part
	$foundatloc= strpos($body,$find); //remember the location
	if ($foundatloc > 1){ // test if a mail adres was found
		$findend = "\n"; 
		$foundendloc = strpos($body,$findend,$foundatloc); // find  the location of EOL
		$foundendloc = $foundendloc -($foundatloc + 5);
		$adres = substr($body,$foundatloc+5,$foundendloc); 
		$adres = str_replace("<","",$adres); // strip <, > and spaces
		$adres = str_replace(">","",$adres);
		$adres = trim($adres);
		array_push($list,$adres); // put the adres is $list
		imap_mail_move($mbox,$msgno,"INBOX.Trash"); // flag as  "move to trash"
		imap_expunge($mbox); // execute move to trash folder
	}
}
unset ($result);
}
// put function to process bouncers/$list here		 
imap_close($mbox); // close connection
?>

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Cleaning up after an emailing