Hi all,

Was just after some light advice as somewhat of a novice. I am running Debian Stable hosting a Drupal site on Apache2 and was looking into the ability to dump emails as text into the website. Note that I DONT want the ability to send emails from the site (like webmail). I just want copies of emails from a POP3 email account (ISP) to be downloaded to my local machine then copied into the website.

I have some programming experiance (allthough all Windows based - VB, .NET, C++), but thinking the task was as simple as:
- Use Mozilla Thunderbird (using it anyway on the local machine) to download mail from my ISP account
- Create an application/script/cron-job (??) to copy the emails from the Mozilla Thunderbird mail folder (/var/spool/mail ??) to a Drupal directory
- Write a module in PHP to allow display and minor management functions in handling the email text.

I have started reading articles on sendmail, fetchmail etc, but WOW, is it more complicated than what I thought email would be! I just dont think I would need any email services, just ride on the back of Mozilla Thunderbird for now.

Its all a bit of a project, one to get me more into the 'guts' of Linux and also to learn some new languages (PHP,...).

If there is something already out there that does what I am after, I would be interested to know (no point in re-inventing the wheel) as I believe being open-source I would be able to pull apart, examine,modify, and redistribute?

Any information/advice much appreciated, like I said just more of a hobby and a start.

TIA

I think PHP may have all the functions you need for this - checkout "http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.imap.php" You would simply have your PHP script read all the emails from a POP3 account, then display them - you shouldn't have to download them to your machine first (but if you want to do that you could via the same script). I've done something like this before in ColdFusion, and I've found PHP to be quite similar...

Hope this helps

Cheers!
Drupal functionality are provided in the form of modules, and it just so happens there in PHP - so will be giving that a go!

Thanks for the link!