What do I need to parse incoming emails?

Question

My intention is to parse incoming emails with PHP. What would be the simplest way to set this up?

Would it suffice to rely on Postfix for this, or is there a better alternative?

The purpose of the parsing is to extract links from incoming emails and store them in the database.

My question is - how can I go about pulling the incoming emails and reading them with another application or script?

*Running Debian

Answer 1

Set up a pipe alias in /etc/aliases that will send the incoming emails to your script:

sendemailhere: |/path/to/script.php

The email itself will be readable from stdin.

Answer 2

Since this is being referenced from other questions as a duplicate.....

I'd recommend considering handling the redirection using an MDA rather than as an MDA. This gives a lot more flexibility. E.g. you can easily set up procmail to filter bounced messages, autorespond to incoming messages, forward a copy to a mailbox and send the email to a script. And it can be managed without root access.