IMAP附件

Question

I'm creating a script in PHP, which's job is to backup an IMAP server to a MySQL database.

My question now is:

If an email has an attachment, is that attachment embedded in the email itself or is it a separate file on the server?

My reason for asking, is:

Can i save the header info in a MySQL db, and thereby extract the attachments in a given email, or do i have to download the attachments to the backup server?

Kind regards,

Frederik Krogh

Answer 1

Any attechment is part of the mail body. It usually is not stored in a different file than the email. Email clients split the body of the email using the mentioned MIME types.

You can read it up in http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2045 (and the following RFCs)