How to Retrieve Emails from Gmail using PHP IMAP

In this article, you will learn how to retrieve emails from Gmail using PHP IMAP.

Email is fast and most important part of communication. We can easily access it from every communication device. It has great importance in small to large organizations. Everyday, they deal with hundreds or thousands of mails. They may also demand to read the emails mailbox from their applications. Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. Clients can get to Gmail on the web and utilizing third party program that synchronize email content through POP or IMAP protocols.

PHP provides IMAP function to access emails from a remote web server to locally end user client. The IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is an Internet standard protocol used to access email messages from mail server. This provides functionality to access email box by multiple clients and create a web based email client. There are more than 70 different functions starting with imap_* provided by PHP.

Configuration of IMAP in PHP server

Before using IMAP in your script, make sure that imap library is installed on your server and enabled in the configuration file. This is by default provided with WAMP server. You can easily check this in the 'php.ini' file. For this, run the following script and check which ini file is assigned in 'Loaded Configuration File' -

<?php php_info(); ?>

Open the 'php.ini' file and search for line number to load imap-

;extension=imap

If the extension is commented like above, remove the semi column like this and restart the WAMP server to make this effective -

extension=imap

You can check whether IMAP is configured or not using the following code-

if (! function_exists('imap_open')) {
  echo "Error: IMAP is not configured.";
  exit();
} 

It is also necessary to enable the IMAP in Gmail account. For this, go to Gmail Settings->Forwarding and POP/IMAP and enable IMAP checkbox.

IMAP Functions

These are the IMAP functions with descriptions that we will use in script to access emails from Gmail account.

imap_open() function

The mostly used function is imap_open(). This allows to create the connection object with the mail server. This requires the following parameters-

imap_open($mailbox, $username, $password)

$mailbox - It consists of the mailbox path of the server.
$username - It contains the username of mail account.
$password - It contains password of mail account.

Example- Connect to GMAIL Account

imap_open('{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl}INBOX','username','password');

The above code opens an IMAP connection to the GMAIL server named imap.gmail.com on port 993. It also passes along with a username and password as the second and third arguments. If you want to connect to the Yahoo account, the IMAP connection code is -

imap_open('{imap.mail.yahoo.com:993/imap/ssl}INBOX','username','password');

You can also connect to the local mail server using the following code-

imap_open('{localhost:993/imap/ssl}INBOX','username','password');

imap_search()

This function returns messages in an array matching the given search criteria.

imap_search($stream, $criteria)

$stream- It is the IMAP connection object returned by the imap_open() function.
$criteria- It is the search criteria delimited by the spaces. It has some pre-defined constants, like - ALL, ANSWERED, BODY, BCC, CC, etc.

imap_fetch_overview()

It reads an overview of the information in the headers of given message.

imap_fetch_overview($stream, $sequence)

$stream- It is the IMAP connection object returned by the imap_open() function.
$sequence- It is a message sequence description.

imap_fetchbody()

It is used to fetch a particular section of the message body.

imap_fetchbody($stream, $number, $section)

$stream- It is the IMAP connection object returned by the imap_open() function.
$number - It is the number of returning messages.
$section - It is the message part number delimited by the period.

PHP IMAP Example

Here is the simple code for retrieving emails from the GMAIL account. In the search criteria, we have passed keyword 'JOB' to fetch all mails having 'JOB' keyword in mail subject.

<html>
<head>How to Retrieve Emails from Gmail using PHP IMAP</head>
<body>
<h1>Gmail Email Inbox using PHP with IMAP</h1>
<?php
    if (! function_exists('imap_open')) {
        echo "IMAP is not configured.";
        exit();
    } else {
?>
<div class="container">
    <?php 
	/* IMAP Connection code with GMAIL IMAP */
	$imap_conn = imap_open('{imap.gmail.com:993/imap/ssl}INBOX', 'username', 'password') or die('Cannot connect to Gmail: ' . imap_last_error());
	
	/* SET email subject filter criteria */
	$inbox = imap_search($imap_conn, 'SUBJECT "JOB"');
	
	if (! empty($inbox)) {
	?>
    <table class="table table-striped">
	<?php
	foreach ($inbox as $email) {
		// Get email header information
		$overview = imap_fetch_overview($imap_conn, $email, 0);
		// Get email body
		$message = imap_fetchbody($imap_conn, $email, '2');
		$date = date("d F, Y", strtotime($overview[0]->date));
	?>
	<tr>
		<td>
		<?php echo $overview[0]->from; ?>
		</td>
		<td>
		<?php echo $overview[0]->subject; ?> - <?php echo $message; ?>
		</td>
		<td>
		<?php echo $date; ?>
		</td>
	</tr>
	<?php
	} 
	?>
	</table>
<?php
 } 
 // Close imap connection
 imap_close($imap_conn);
}
?>
</div>
</body>
</html>

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