We are working on a web application written in PHP where the following needs to happen:
1) Users at signup are given a unique email address by the web application.
2) Users can give out the email address to collaborators who submit content via email
3) A PHP script will have to monitor for new emails
4) New emails will be parsed and loaded into a database for use by the web application.
Right now, I'm looking at using Postfix with Courier on an Ubuntu server and then issuing calls to the system via PHP's exec() or system() commands.
Are there better solutions out there for this?
I would use something like node.js that can handle the email monitoring and system calls.
Take a look at node-imap as a good example.