Nowadays, most Web mail sites provide POP3 support, so you can retrieve your mailbox messages using PHP or any other language.
However, each system uses different ports and encryption configuration that you need to know in order to access them.
This article provides information on the details of accessing the messages on some of the most popular Web mail systems via POP 3.
It also provides a solution to a common problem, which is how to retrieve only the newly received messages when you never delete messages from the mailbox.
Some PHP applications need to process incoming e-mail messages, for instance to handle customer requests sent by e-mail.
Using a POP3 or IMAP mailbox is a very reliable and platform independent solution.
This article explains how to handle incoming e-mail using a POP3 client script and compares it with other solutions that depend on the local mail server type.