Read all data from socket

[señorbadger]

hello i am connecting to a POP3 server and want to read all the data recived into a variable

as you prolly know fgets() only retrives 1 line of data so i made this loop, but when it executes it hits an infinate loop

while (!feof ($fd)) {

    $buffer = fgets($fd, 4096);

    echo $buffer;

} 

obiously not good

how can i do this since it says socket_read() is not defined on my hosting server but fsockopen() works fine

thanks for ya help