Capture Bounced Email Addresses via PHP

Question

I am currently working on a project which processes an array of data which is imported from a csv. Once the data has been processed for that specific row, it will send an email to the email address specified for that row.

My client has a requirement that they need to know if an email bounces due to an incorrect email address being entered to the csv.

I currently send the emails by using PHP and an SMTP relay which we host, The only way that i have found to work so far is to scan the sending email address for any emails which contains the subject Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender.

This is working perfectly and i am getting a list of all of the emails which have bounced. My problem is that i need to get the email address which was entered incorrectly. If you see the screenshot below you can see that the script generates an HTML element/node which contains the email address.

My question is, How to i grab/call this element?

I have tried print_ring the email object, unfortunately there is no array index with the email address which i require.

Please see my code below to see how i have gotten this far:

<?php 

    $date = date('y-m-d');
    $hostname = '';
    $username = '';
    $password = '';

    $inbox = imap_open($hostname,$username,$password) or die('Cannot 
    connect to mailbox: ' . imap_last_error());
    $emails = imap_search($inbox,'SUBJECT "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" ON "'.$date.'"');


    if($emails){
    rsort($emails);
        foreach($emails as $email){
            $overview = imap_fetch_overview($inbox,$email,0);
            $message = imap_body($inbox, $email);
            print_r($overview);
            print_r($message);
            echo '<br>';

            print_r($email);
        }
    }

Thanks for your excellent help and support over the past.

Lewis

Do you have any code examples? The address has to be in there somewhere.. — Kyrre, Sep 26 '17 at 13:50
Added the code on how i am grabbing the emails, The only place the email address is specified is in the html node which i referred to earlier. Thanks — Lewis Browne, Sep 26 '17 at 13:55
I've never used `imap_search()`, but I see you are using the `SUBJECT` and `ON` keywords.. according to http://php.net/manual/en/function.imap-search.php, there is a `TO` keyword. Maybe you can do some magic with the query, some wildcarding maybe? Sorry if I'm pestering and not helping, but what does `$emails` contain? — Kyrre, Sep 26 '17 at 14:02
No problem man, ill see if i can pull some wizardry on it! The `$emails` is an array of all of the emails which were returned by the `.imap_search` `$email` contains basic information such as, `sent_date`, `sent_to` and `sent_from`. Before you say `sent_to` sounds like what you are asking for. No, the email address specified here is the email address which contains all of the bounced emails. I appreciate your help! — Lewis Browne, Sep 26 '17 at 14:08
Possible duplicate of [How to catch bounced emails in PHP?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20996216/how-to-catch-bounced-emails-in-php) — David J Eddy, Sep 26 '17 at 14:12
As stated in my question, i am already getting all of the bounced email content my question is, how to i harvest the email address from it. — Lewis Browne, Sep 26 '17 at 14:16

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 26 '17 at 14:37

David and Kyrre managed to point me in the right direction, after a little more research i was able find that the email address is also located as being a Final-Recipient after a little research on how to grab the Final-Recipient i was able to grab what i needed.

To do this i did the following as discussed on this SA thread: Regular expression to parse Final-Recipient email header

    $message = imap_body($inbox, $email);
    $pattern = '/Final-Recipient: rfc822; (.*)/';
    $matches = Array();
    preg_match($pattern, $message, $matches);
    $email = $matches[1];

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 26 '17 at 14:12

0

As @Kyrre mentioned the imap_search() string, pretend it is a SQL query. Getting bounced email was answered here. There is also this sweet walk through that returns the entire email message content.

answered Sep 26 '17 at 14:12

David J Eddy

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Capture Bounced Email Addresses via PHP

2 Answers2