Mbox Parsing

ImapEngine provides support for parsing and reading local Mbox files through the DirectoryTree\ImapEngine\Mbox class. This allows you to interact with email messages stored locally in an Mbox file, rather than via an IMAP server.

Retrieving Messages from an Mbox File

To get started, instantiate the Mbox class by providing the path to your Mbox file. For example:

use DirectoryTree\ImapEngine\Mbox;

$mbox = new Mbox('/home/username/mail/stevebauman.mbox');

/** @var \DirectoryTree\ImapEngine\FileMessage $message */
foreach ($mbox->messages() as $message) {
    // Work with each FileMessage instance.
}

How It Works

When you call the messages() method, an internal file handle to your Mbox file is opened and each message is read and yielded back as a FileMessage instance.

This approach makes it possible to process the file message-by-message rather than loading the entire Mbox file into memory at once.

Custom Delimiters

By default, the Mbox class uses a regular expression delimiter to detect new messages. If your Mbox file uses a different format or requires a custom delimiter, you can override it:

$mbox = new Mbox('/home/username/mail/stevebauman.mbox');

// Provide a custom delimiter.
$messages = $mbox->messages(
    delimiter: '/^From\\s+someCustomRegexHere/'
);

Interacting with File Messages

Every message read from the Mbox file is returned as an instance of DirectoryTree\ImapEngine\FileMessage. This class is designed to parse the raw email data and provide convenient methods to access the message’s body, headers, attachments, and more.

Basic Usage

/** @var \DirectoryTree\ImapEngine\FileMessage $message */
foreach ($mbox->messages() as $message) {
    // Get the raw contents of the message:
    $raw = $message->raw();

    // Check if the message has a body:
    if ($message->hasBody()) {
        // Retrieve the message body.
        $body = $message->body();
    }

    // Retrieve headers (if available):
    $headers = $message->headers();

    // Retrieve attachments:
    foreach ($message->attachments() as $attachment) {
        // Work with each attachment.
        $attachmentContents = $attachment->contents();
    }
}