{"id":14216,"date":"2021-03-08T13:46:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-08T13:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newblog.siteground.com\/en\/?p=14216"},"modified":"2025-09-18T14:40:26","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T14:40:26","slug":"piping-email-php-siteground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.siteground.com\/blog\/piping-email-php-siteground\/","title":{"rendered":"Piping Email with PHP and SiteGround"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the fun things to do with computers is to think outside the box, to use tools for things they aren\u2019t exactly designed for. Email is one of my favorite toys with which to play with. Email is universal, and everyone has it. So when you create a new user for it, everyone can now do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What can we make email do that it doesn\u2019t do already? Well, email is a delivery system, so we can use it to not only deliver data of some kind, but also to trigger an event that causes a computer somewhere to do something. If necessary, email can also respond back to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early days of the web, there were email addresses you could send an email to with a URL in the body. It would retrieve the URL and send you back the copy. Email pre-dated the web on the Internet, so there was a time when people had email but not web browser. This was a great way to get to the web before you got a web browser. The downside was that most email at that time didn\u2019t support images, but this was okay because most webpages at this time didn\u2019t HAVE images. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve also used email to deliver data and trigger processing. Last year for Mother\u2019s day, I built my mother and mother-in-law digital picture frames based on Raspberry Pis. The front-end media management for these frames is a WordPress site. This gave me a convenient API already built to deliver images to. The problem is that my siblings are not programmers, so I needed an easy way for them to send images to these frames. Email was that easy way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I created a system that allows them to send a picture via email. Each digital picture frame has an email address, and they can send pictures to it. While WordPress handles all the user management and image processing, SiteGround\u2019s email system allows me to make all of this happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The way to do this is called a \u201cpipe\u201d because you are \u201cpiping\u201d the contents of an email to a program of your choosing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll stop here and tell you upfront that if you are not a programmer or at least a very technical user, this is not for you. Programmers can write programs (like I did) to take the input and process it. Technical users may also be able to install programs on their server that will accept the input and do something with it. If you are not in one of these two groups, I suggest you go find a programmer<\/a> you trust and hire them to help you do this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In SiteGround, the process is pretty simple. You first create an email address<\/a>, then you create a filter for that email address. In my case, I created momspictureframe@example.com (not the real email address) in my Site Tools<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I went to filters<\/a> and created a filter for momspictureframe@calevansxample.com.<\/p>\n\n\n\n