Example
To do anything with an IMAP account you need to connect to it first. To do this you need to specify some required parameters:
- The server name or IP address of the mail server
- The port you wish to connect on
- IMAP is 143 or 993 (secure)
- POP is 110 or 995 (secure)
- SMTP is 25 or 465 (secure)
- NNTP is 119 or 563 (secure)
- Connection flags (see below)
| Flag | Description | Options | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
/service=service | Which service to use | imap, pop3, nntp, smtp | imap |
/user=user | remote user name for login on the server | ||
/authuser=user | remote authentication user; if specified this is the user name whose password is used (e.g. administrator) | ||
/anonymous | remote access as anonymous user | ||
/debug | record protocol telemetry in application's debug log | disabled | |
/secure | do not transmit a plaintext password over the network | ||
/norsh | do not use rsh or ssh to establish a preauthenticated IMAP session | ||
/ssl | use the Secure Socket Layer to encrypt the session | ||
/validate-cert | certificates from TLS/SSL server | enabled | |
/novalidate-cert | do not validate certificates from TLS/SSL server, needed if server uses self-signed certificates. USE WITH CAUTION | disabled | |
/tls | force use of start-TLS to encrypt the session, and reject connection to servers that do not support it | ||
/notls | do not do start-TLS to encrypt the session, even with servers that support it | ||
/readonly | request read-only mailbox open (IMAP only; ignored on NNTP, and an error with SMTP and POP3) |
Your connection string will look something like this:
{imap.example.com:993/imap/tls/secure}
Please note that if any of the characters in your connection string is non-ASCII it must be encoded with utf7_encode($string).
To connect to the mailbox, we use the imap_open command which returns a resource value pointing to a stream:
<?php
$mailbox = imap_open("{imap.example.com:993/imap/tls/secure}", "username", "password");
if ($mailbox === false) {
echo "Failed to connect to server";
}
