PHP 7.3.14 Released
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    User Contributed Notes 16 notes

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    22
    Anonymous
    7 years ago
    The date format for e.g. SINCE is, according to rfc3501:

    date            = date-text / DQUOTE date-text DQUOTE

    date-day        = 1*2DIGIT
                        ; Day of month

    date-day-fixed  = (SP DIGIT) / 2DIGIT
                        ; Fixed-format version of date-day

    date-month      = "Jan" / "Feb" / "Mar" / "Apr" / "May" / "Jun" /
                      "Jul" / "Aug" / "Sep" / "Oct" / "Nov" / "Dec"

    date-text       = date-day "-" date-month "-" date-year

    So a valid date is e.g. "22-Jul-2012" with or without the double quotes.
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    13
    mail at nikha dot org
    5 years ago
    Hi,
    be aware, that imap_search() does NOT (as you may exspect) return an empty array, if nothing was found!
    As the manual says, it returns FALSE.

    Do not test the result like "count($array)" as I did.
    This gives you 1 for an empty result. Took me an hour to found out why :-(  RTFM
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    10
    james at medbirdie dot com
    7 years ago
    To set your own CHARSET, which is useful if you are dealing with Chinese Japanese and Korean queries.

    <?php imap_search($inbox,'BODY "'.$keyword.'"', SE_FREE, "UTF-8"); ?>
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    2
    joseph dot cardwell at jbcwebservices dot com
    7 years ago
    imap_search() always returns false when op_silent flag is set in the connection parameters.
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    4
    britty dot it at hotmail dot com
    3 years ago
    imap_search function is not fully compatible with IMAP4. the c-client used as of now supports only IMAP2 and some search criterion will not be available for use such as "OR"

    So a php code similar to:
    $inbox   = imap_open('{imap.example.com:993/imap/ssl}INBOX', 'foo@example.com', 'pass123', OP_READONLY);
    $search_string = 'SUBJECT "FedEx" OR SUBJECT "USPS"';   
    $emails = imap_search($inbox, $search_string);

    will throw an error saying "Unknown search criterion"

    observations and reference:

    PHP source trace:(ref: https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/master/ext/imap/php_imap.c)
        /ext/imap/php_imap.c -> line no : 4126
        imap_search => line no : 4148

    c-client library source trace:
    src/c-client/mail.c -> line no : 3973

    internal.txt -> line no : 1919 => mail_criteria()
        criteria IMAP2-format search criteria string
        WARNING: This function does not accept IMAP4 search criteria.

    IMAP2 RFC1064 => [ref: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1064] [page: 13]
    IMAP4 RFC2060 => [ref: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2060.html] [section: 6.4.4]

    Note:
    The core search functionality in a core module(IMAP) is still not available in PHP. Hope this will be brought to the developer community's attention...
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    3
    trimoreau dot yonn at gmail dot com
    6 years ago
    It's not possible to find strings containing double quotes using this function.

    For example, if you got a message named : Hello, this is "Bob"
    You can try :
         imap_search($inbox, 'SUBJECT "Hello, this is "Bob""')
    Or
         imap_search($inbox, "SUBJECT 'Hello, this is \"Bob\"'")

    But both are false, because you did not escape double quotes in the first case, and you can NOT use simple quotes in the imap_search criteria in the second case.

    The real problem is that you cannot use simple quotes to surround your criteria in the 2nd argument of imap_search, after SUBJECT.
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    1
    oliver at samera dot com dot py
    17 years ago
    imap_search() only supports IMAP2 search criterias, because the function mail_criteria() (from c-client lib) is used in ext/imap/php_imap.c for parsing the search string.
    IMAP2 search criteria is defined in RFC 1176, section "tag SEARCH search_criteria".
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    0
    samy.sadi.contact in gmail
    3 months ago
    utf-8 charset isn't supported on outlook 365. So you might get a false return value here, if you pass that charset.
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    0
    Paula
    3 years ago
    This is the correct way to use the imap_search with ON "date"

    $date = date("j F Y");

    $emails = imap_search($inbox,'ON "'.$date.'"' );
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    0
    andrea dot job at libero dot it
    5 years ago
    the second parameter about Criteria does not work well on ON criterion.
    In facts if I wish to put parameters from $_get into the format Day-Month-Year (01-01-14 for example) will return Unknown criterion etc.
    Probably is not the right format ?

    Even with for example Thu-Jan-2014 get the same message.
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    -2
    Brett
    7 years ago
    I haven't found any documentation of the allowed date formats, but (for example) "14 May 2012" works.

    // Find UIDs of messages within the past week
    $date = date ( "d M Y", strToTime ( "-7 days" ) );
    $uids = imap_search ( $mbox, "SINCE \"$date\"", SE_UID );
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    -3
    admin at rancid-tea dot com
    12 years ago
    This search looks for messages matching ALL criteria, not ANY criteria. For example the search

    imap_search($mailbox,'FROM "user" TO "user"')

    Will return message that have "user" in both the from and to headers, but not messages with "user" in either the from or to header.
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    -3
    oliver at samera dot com dot py
    17 years ago
    imap_search() return false if it does not understand the search condition or no messages have been found.

    $emails imap_seach($mbox, "UNDELETED SENTSINCE 01-Jan-2002");
    if($emails === false)
      echo "The search failed";
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    -6
    Anonymous
    5 years ago
    about my previous note:

    <<the second parameter about Criteria does not work well on ON criterion.
    In facts if I wish to put parameters from $_get into the format Day-Month-Year (01-01-14 for example) will return Unknown criterion etc.
    Probably is not the right format ?

    Even with for example Thu-Jan-2014 get the same message. >>
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Now works ;)

    Just to pass not a date string into criteria parameter but a timestamp returned by mktime function, where you can put your date string.

    Solution for any date/time criterion is a unix timestamp.
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    -7
    tgely
    3 years ago
    If email subject is encoded than use encoding charset and option in search  to find something.

    Mail Header:

    Subject: =?UTF-8?Q?XYZ?=

    <?php imap_search($inbox,'SUBJECT "'.$keyword.'"', SE_FREE, "UTF-8"); ?>
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    -35
    anonymous at anonymous dot ru
    5 years ago
    the function "imap_search" not work for some mails , maybe that because header syntax or some bug .

    thanks a lot
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