PHPMaster.com has published the second part of their series taking you on a tour through PHP's IMAP extension and its use. In part one they introduced the extension and showed how to connect, get the folders/emails and view message contents. In this part they expand n that and show you how to work with the messages and attachments.

In the first part of this series I discussed how to connect to IMAP servers using PHP’s IMAP extension. In this part we’ll complete the series by discussing working with folders and reading email content. Let’s get started!

He shows how to work with the "flags" set on messages (read, unread, replied, etc) - pulling them from the server and using the imap_setflag_full function to set them. There's a quick mention of deleting messages with imap_delete/imap_expunge and a section on viewing and downloading the attachments to messages.

Tobias Schlitt has some comments to share after taking a look at the way the Gentoo project is handling its PHP installation (through Portage).

I love portage above everything else, believe me, but the PHP package sucks. Although it compiles really well and is very easy to configure (hey, thanks Sebastian and all the other maintainers!), Gentoo seems to have an issue with enabling certain compiling options by default. If you don't set any of the USE flags (configuration options for compiling packages through Portage) for PHP, it will simply compile with --disable-all and is completly unusable.

He discovered this when he was working through an install to test something for eZ components and had to add in flags to the system just to get anything he could use. HE wonders why the most basic flags arean't included just by default, making for a much easier time for most users just needing something to get started with.

Tobias Schlitt has some comments to share after taking a look at the way the Gentoo project is handling its PHP installation (through Portage).

I love portage above everything else, believe me, but the PHP package sucks. Although it compiles really well and is very easy to configure (hey, thanks Sebastian and all the other maintainers!), Gentoo seems to have an issue with enabling certain compiling options by default. If you don't set any of the USE flags (configuration options for compiling packages through Portage) for PHP, it will simply compile with --disable-all and is completly unusable.

He discovered this when he was working through an install to test something for eZ components and had to add in flags to the system just to get anything he could use. HE wonders why the most basic flags arean't included just by default, making for a much easier time for most users just needing something to get started with.