Parsing emails sent from Outlook 2007 not working

[HP8haNU7YxzBkTA]

Emails sent from Outlook 2007 can not be parsed because email 'to' address is formatted as follows:

< user@email.com > (without spaces)

Instead of the typical:

user@email.com

[plancake]

Hi.

Thanks for your bug reporting.

Have you found out how to fix it?

Cheers,
Dan

On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 4:21 AM, HP8haNU7YxzBkTA <
reply@reply.github.com

wrote:

Emails sent from Outlook 2007 can not be parsed because email is formatted
as follows:

user@email.com

Instead of the typical:

user@email.com

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#4

[behzadev]

Also emails from Yahoo has the same problem, the yahoo "TO" is like:
firstname lastname < example@example.com > (without spaces)

[behzadev]

OK, as far as I see this bug, we just need to get out the $email var from the string, this little bug could be fixed so simple:

// we've got the $to variable, we just need to apply this to the getTo()
function extract_email_address ($string) {
foreach(preg_split('/ /', $string) as $token) {
$email = filter_var(filter_var($token, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL), FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
if ($email !== false) {
$emails[] = $email;
}
}
return $emails;
}

//then:
$to = ($emailTo = $emailParser->getTo());
$to = extract_email_address($to[0]);

now we've got the right email :)

[appastair]

Your preg_split('/ /', $string) should be a bit more efficient and reliable with this:

preg_match_all('/\w+\@\w+\.[a-z]{2,}/', $string, $email);
foreach($email as $token) {...}

It should only grab e-mail addresses as opposed to splitting at every space.

[behzadev]

@appastair see the next lines! it's using the "FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL" PHP function to validate the string to check if it's valid email address or not...

[appastair]

I understand those lines but depending on the value of $string, it will try to validate each item after the / / split instead of just e-mail addresses. If it's only a few characters beyond the address it won't be much improved but if it's processing much more it's looping needlessly.

If your input is always going to be something like < abc@123.org > you could just do trim($email, '< >').

Though I don't see how the preg_split or trim could be more efficient in this situation (e-mail-isolation and validation).

If I've missed something integral; just ignore me hehe but I'm only trying to help and you could compare execution time for each methods to see what works the quickest and most reliably.

[behzadev]

@appastair I just get what you're trying to say, yes, if it's a long string, your solution will definitely speed up the process.

Thanks for your help, another thing, could you get "Forwarded-To" from the headers? I mean if you forward the email to another email, a line will be included in the forwarded email header, like:

X-Forwarded-To:

In the application I'm working on, I need to check if this email which I got is forwarded from another address, or it's sent directly to me, till now, still I'm not able to check if it's a forwarded email or it's sent directly to my address.

P.S: by forwarded I mean, imagine we have 1@example.com, 2@example.com and me@mydomain.com.
Here on the server side I'm piping my emails(me@mydomain.com) to a handler.php, if 1@example.com sends me an email, it has been sent directly to me, but if 1@example.com send an email to 2@example.com, and 2@example.com has an automatic forwarder to me@mydomain.com, then it's a forwarded message. in such situation, the FROM and TO wont change, but one line like "X-Forwarded-To" will be added to the email address.

Thanks

[appastair]

Yeah, that's easy but you'd need to provide an example e-mail. Maybe use some paste service like paste2. Without a sample, this might work but it's getting hackish!

preg_replace('/\X\-\Forwarded\-\To.?\s(\w+\@\w+\.[a-z]{2,})/', '$1', 'X-Forwarded-To 123@abc.net.au');

[behzadev]

@appastair Here you go for the example email with complete headers:
http://paste2.org/p/2285198

It's when an email is sent FROM persian.star[at]ymail.com TO hostpersia[at]gmail.com and the hostpersia[at]gmail.com is forwarding messages to e2s[at]persian-star.ir. the above email is the completed mail with headers which e2s[at]persian-star.ir received.

Thanks in advance

P.S: if your script for getting "forwarded-to" works, the out put should be "e2s[at]persian-star.ir"

[appastair]

Give it a whirl in the php-cli package.
$string = "Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:29:45 -0700 (PDT) X-Forwarded-To: e2s@persian-star.ir X-Forwarded-For: hostpersia@gmail.com e2s@persian-star.ir"; echo preg_replace('/.*\X\-\Forwarded\-\To\:\s([a-z0-9-_.]{1,}\@[a-z0-9-]{2,}\.[a-z]{2,}(\.\w{2,})?).*/s', '$1', $string);

I added an optional part for third-level registrations for example: nominet.org.uk

If you wanted to loop through this for each seaction of the header, it should work by substituting \X\-\Forwarded\-\To with \Delivered\-\To etc. but keep in mind it's expecting a following \:\s (colon then space) before the e-mail address so it might need modification to make it more modular.