Some web applications might require features of an email client to be made available the users. In these situations, we can either write our own or customize opensource clients like SquirrelMail or Roundcube. Regardless of what you choose, knowledge of working with IMAP mail will be helpful.

In this two-part series I’ll explain how to work with PHP’s IMAP extension. This is the first part which discusses the necessary functions for connecting to mail servers and reading messages. The second part will talk about actions for working with email, like deleting messages, downloading attachments, etc.

Connecting to Email Servers with PHP imap_open Imap library provided by php can be used to connect to your email accounts and handle functions like email reading,composing,forwarding..etc. You will have to install the imap library depending on your php installation. imap_open function is used to connect to email servers. It will open a imap connection [...]