{"id":3971,"date":"2026-02-28T10:13:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T10:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/knowledgebase\/email-piping-and-hosted-email\/"},"modified":"2026-08-19T14:00:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T13:00:41","slug":"email-piping-and-hosted-email","status":"publish","type":"kb_article","link":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/knowledgebase\/email-piping-and-hosted-email\/","title":{"rendered":"Email Piping and Hosted Email"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some applications can process incoming email automatically. Helpdesk systems, mailing list tools and ticket systems often use this kind of feature.<\/p>\n

Direct email piping into a script is not usually available on standard hosted email. Email and web hosting are commonly separated for security, reliability and performance reasons, so inbound messages cannot simply be piped into a PHP script on the hosting account.<\/p>\n

If your software needs to collect incoming email, check whether it supports POP or IMAP collection. Most helpdesk and ticket systems can log in to a mailbox, download new messages and turn them into tickets or records.<\/p>\n

To use this method:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Create a mailbox for the application.<\/li>\n
  2. Find the mailbox username, password and mail server settings.<\/li>\n
  3. Add those details to the application.<\/li>\n
  4. Choose how often the application should check for new messages.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If you are not sure whether your application can collect mail by POP or IMAP, check the application’s documentation or contact its developer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Some applications can process incoming email automatically. Helpdesk systems, mailing list tools and ticket systems often use this kind of feature. Direct email piping…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","kb_category":[7],"class_list":["post-3971","kb_article","type-kb_article","status-publish","hentry","kb_category-email"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_article\/3971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/kb_article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_article\/3971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4071,"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_article\/3971\/revisions\/4071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"kb_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.4uhosting.co.uk\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/kb_category?post=3971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}