Pipe email to PHP - get mail adress from MySQL - send?

Posted on 16th Feb 2014 by admin

Hi all,

this is the challenge:

1) Our faculty at the college where I'm employed includes quite a bit of freelancers that don't check the college mailbox quite as often as the administration would like.
2) I have created forwarders in the form firstname.lastname@ourcollege.com, forwarded to their private mailboxes. That has worked fine up until now.
3) Lately we implemented Moodle as a course platform. As Moodle relies on a MySQL backend, this gave me the idea that something much more flexible would be possible.


I would need a php script that

1) grabs the email piped from cPanel,

2) extracts the email address 'just before', that is, the part in the header that indicates where it were piped from (is that possible? - I'm talking about the last part in a rather complex group mail forwarding sceme, just before the pipe = (ie staff@ourcollege.com->teachers@ourcollege.com->firstname.lastname@ourcollege.com),

3) queries the MySQL database by this field (official_email) and brings back another related field (private_email),

4) forwards the original email to that private e-mail address.

This would give us the opportunity to have our "forwarders -> real mail adresses' list constantly up-to-date, as all the freelancers could keep their records up to date all by themselves through the moodle user front-end interface.

This is, however, beyond me. I know the basics of piping from cPanel, and some rudimental PHP and MySQL, but that's it. Any help would be most appreciated.

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