PHP Receive Email: How to Receive and Parse Incoming Email in PHP and Laravel

PHP cannot directly listen for incoming SMTP email, so applications must receive messages through a managed inbound-email API webhook, by polling an existing IMAP mailbox, or through a mail server that pipes raw messages to a script. The guide recommends managed inbound APIs such as Mailtrap for most new applications because they provide hosted addresses, signed webhooks, parsed message data, and minimal infrastructure, while stressing raw-body HMAC verification, idempotent webhook handling, attachment-expiration constraints, and queued processing. IMAP is positioned for mailboxes that already exist, with the pure-PHP ImapEngine library recommended over the removed and increasingly difficult-to-build ext/imap extension, particularly because modern Gmail and Microsoft 365 authentication requires OAuth/XOAUTH2. Running an MTA such as Postfix and piping messages to PHP is the fastest method, with measured delivery around tens of milliseconds, but requires server administration, MIME parsing, careful permissions, correct exit codes, and testing under the mail-delivery user to prevent silent failures. For raw messages received through IMAP or pipes, the guide recommends a MIME parser to decode headers, bodies, character sets, and attachments, and suggests normalizing all sources into a common internal email structure. It also covers catch-all routing, Laravel integration, provider differences, and the distinction between receiving email and the separate task of sending replies with proper deliverability controls.

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