How to get an email to trigger an HTTP request (or otherwise execute some function in PHP)

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
[quote author="Thomas Hunter" date="1259176705"]Does anyone know of a push technique that doesn't require the forwarder being predefined? E.g. How to create a webmail app using php?[/quote]

Sure, apparently this is a feature that is entirely dependent on your servers sendmail setup, so you need either root access or an accommodating hosting provider.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/...ved-55835/

http://www.techniqal.com/blog/2005/11/14...rom-email/

This doesn't seem to be very commonly used so I didn't find anything specific to PHP, but you don't really need it.

All you need to figure out is how to get your sendmail program to activate a script upon email reception. Then you can just use the cron-related tutorials on running CI from command line, and off you go!

EDIT: Also you can probably use some PHP classes out there to control mailbox creation, so you can automate the creation of the mailbox and therefore control the piping, too, if you only want certain mailboxes to get handled instead of getting all emails to trigger the result.