See if the email exists or not

Question

I have extracted a bunch of emails using PHP IMAP connection and assigned those emails to a custom post type. Here's the code how I assigned those emails to custom post type.

    $total =  $emails->total_msg(); 
    for ($j=1; $j <= $total; $j++) { 
       $mail =  $emails->get($j);
       $post_array = array( 
        'post_content'  => $mail['body'],
        'post_title'    => $mail['header']->subject,
        'post_type'     => 'my-custom-post-type',
        'post_status'   => 'publish',
        'meta_input'    => array(
            'from'      => $mail['header']->fromaddress,
            'email_date'=> $mail['header']->Date,   // add post meta as many as you want
            'ticket_id' => $mail['header']->message_id,
            ),
       );
       wp_insert_post($post_array);
    }

Now, $emails is where I stored all the emails. I want to do a simple check that if the emails already exist do not do wp_insert_post() and if the email does not exist then only do wp_insert_post. I don't much about logic and how to do it. If someone can do it. It will be a big help.

Answer 1

First, you need to create the following function:

function checkEmailAlreadyExists( $message_id ) {
    $posts_with_meta = get_posts( array(
        'posts_per_page' => 1, // we only want to check if any exists, so don't need to get all of them
        'post_type'      => 'my-custom-post-type',
        'meta_key'       => 'ticket_id',
        'meta_value'     => $message_id,
        'fields'         => 'ids', // we don't need it's content, etc.
    ) );

    return ( count( $posts_with_meta ) ) ? true : false;    
}

Now you just have to add it to your current code:

$total = $emails->total_msg(); 
for ( $j=1; $j <= $total; $j++ ) {
    $mail = $emails->get( $j );
    if ( !empty( $mail['header']->message_id ) && !checkEmailAlreadyExists( $mail['header']->message_id )  ) {
        $post_array = array( 
            'post_content'  => $mail['body'],
            'post_title'    => $mail['header']->subject,
            'post_type'     => 'my-custom-post-type',
            'post_status'   => 'publish',
            'meta_input'    => array(
                'from'       => $mail['header']->fromaddress,
                'email_date' => $mail['header']->Date,
                'ticket_id'  => $mail['header']->message_id,
            ),
        );
        wp_insert_post( $post_array );
    }
}