There are a number of cool things that you can do after opening up an IMAP connection in PHP (monitoring bounce-back rates, processing incoming attachments, etc.) but before you do, you have get connected. Normally, this is a pretty straight-forward process, but sometimes different mail server settings can throw you a curveball. Here’s a couple quick tips to help you get started:

1. Open up a phpinfo() page and make sure that you have the IMAP extensions installed. If you don’t, here are the instructions on how to get them.
2. Copy our PHP IMAP Connection Tester onto your server and configure it with your account information.
3. That’s it. I told you that was easy!

A note: I ran into the following error today: “Certificate failure for mail.example.com: Server name does not match certificate.” It took me a while to find the solution but finally came up with this — add /novalidate-cert after the port number. So, for example, if you’re using our tester, set $mail_port = 143/novalidate-cert; Hope that helps!

If you have any other tips, help the world out and share them below!

Tags: Code, email, IMAP, PHP

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 5:02 pm by Robert James Reese and is filed under Code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.