If you set up an aws EC2 instance and use an elastic IP - the incoming smtp is blocked.

Don't let anyone kid you - its a fact.    It doesn't matter if you adjust your security group

to allow incoming smtp.

So what is the alternative?

The answer I came up with today is forwardemail.net

It allows you to assign mx servers and route your email.

It allows you to route to a specific mailbox AND, AND, AND it allows you to setup

a webhook to post to when emails are sent.

A webhook is a piece of code on a server that accepts a payload.

In this case its a json with the wad of an email each time that someone sends an email

to a particular domain.

The documentation from forwardemail.net on the particular json packet sent is non

existent - but it doesn't matter once you see the json.

Ok - so once you get the wad of json - the next thing is to parse the email.

Again this is a piece of arcana that is a bit weak on documentation.

1. php has mailparse - this is a pecl addition to parse mime emails.

2. there is a library that uses the pecl library mailparse.

    php-mime-mail-parser is a php library that supposedly is supported for php 8+

And if you are going to mess with this stuff believe me, you want to be able to have

baseline to test emails with:

Here is a link to a really solid tool to send emails:

https://sendtestemail.com

Ok, don't forget the implications of a) SPF b) DKIM C) DMARC D) Reverse DNS

Here is sample code for a webhook from forwardemail.net that seems to work.

The code depends on a bunch of other stuff - but it should be a good start in

allowing you to grab the data.

function do_inject($path)
  {
      header('Content-Type: application/json');
      $request = file_get_contents('php://input');

      $rand = rand(1000,2000);
      $raw ="/m/member/tmp/incoming.".$rand.".email";
      $parsed = "/m/member/tmp/incoming.".$rand.".parsed";
      file_put_contents($raw,$request);
      require_once "parseinject.php";
      $pi = new parseinject();
      $fields = $pi->parse($request);
      $emailparsed = "";
      foreach ($fields as $key=>$value)
      {
          $emailparsed .= $key."\n";
          $emailparsed .= $value."\n";
          $emailparsed .= "\n";
          $emailparsed .= "\n";
      }
      file_put_contents($parsed,$emailparsed);
      require_once "background/injector/injectmail.php";
      $imail =new injectmail();
      $imail->source_email = $fields['from'];
      $imail->target_email = $fields['address'];
      $imail->email_content = $fields['raw'];
      $imail->email_size = strlen($fields['html']);
      $imail->queue_reference = $field['messageid'];
      $imail->ship2queue();
      echo "INJECTED";
      http_response_code(200); }