Lets take a look at the following scenario: I have a websitesite, site.com. One customer support tech guy has an email account on it: . Customers send messages to that email, tech guy replies via that email. They are both using desktop email clients (thunderbird, outlook...). What I know is: using php to read incoming mail from customers What I want to know is: how to use php to read outgoing mail that the tech guy is sending from his client via smtp, imap.. This would be used for archiving conversations between techs and customers without forcing them to use some php app on the site to send emails (I want them to use desktop clients). I dont know much about email protocols, but I have plenty of experience in php. Im guessing that the email daemon could be setup to call a php script every time it recieves an outgoing email or something like that. Is there any way that this can be done?