There’s going to come a time in your life when you’ll want to check an email account using PHP. Trust me on this. You’ll want to add an unread message counter to an intranet project, write a “Post via Email” module to your custom built CMS or even, God forbid, write your own webmail application.

When this day comes you’re going to want to use the PHP POP3 Class by Manuel Lemos. It’s available on the awful looking and barely functional PHP Classes site at: http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2.html

This baby does it all. The example file is a bit of a mess but you can hack out a lot of the debug code quickly and easily to make it more manageable. You’ll be up and running in minutes.