Introduction

How many times have you been away from your home PC and wished that you could check your IMAP/POP3 mail account? If you're anything like me then you're always on the move and your laptop is your best friend.

Thanks to PHP, we can check our email account remotely using PHP and its imap_xxx functions, which allow us to communicate with mail servers via IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), POP3 (Post Office Protocol) and/or NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol).

In this article we're going to build a mail script that will accept an email account, password and optional IMAP port number. The script will then login to that mail account and display the users inbox in a similar fashion to the way Hotmail does: all using only PHP and HTML. From the inbox screen, we have the option to compose a new email, view our emails and even reply to them.

To test the source code and examples in this article you should be running either a Windows/Linux server with IIS/Apache and PHP 4+ installed. You should also have the IMAP libraries installed, which we will look at shortly.

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