Web mail in PHP, Page 3

Also note that at the beginning of the function

m_login()

Next, if you look at where we call the

imap_open()

Listing contents of a mailbox

To the left of every message there's a small checkbox. If you wish to delete several e-mail messages at a time you just check them and push the delete button.

The function

m_list()

imapfuncs.phl

Viewing a message

m_display()

Sending a message

If you choose the latter you will get a message composition form with the recipient already filled in and the message you are replying to glued in and quoted in the text area where you type in your mail. However, if you choose the compose button on the mailbox listing page you get an empty form.

The function

m_compose()

$msgno

$mailbox

Once the message has been composed the browser sends the contents of the mail form back to the webmail interface which then calls the function

m_send()

What can be made better?

Most IMAP clients implement various methods to access, list, and manipulate mail folders on the server. It shouldn't be too hard to add this to our interface. Most of the code for listing mail folders and browsing messages in them is already there. (Notice how it makes a point of remembering what folder it was playing around in although the folder name is blank. The blank folder name is mapped to the default mailbox).

Handling attachments and multipart MIME messages isn't too hard to add either. Most of the functions you need to figure out the structure of such mail messages are already present in the IMAP library that PHP uses.

If your organization uses LDAP to keep track of information about its employees, organization, access privileges, and so forth, a natural extension of the Web mail interface would be to integrate it with LDAP. And of course, PHP can be built with support for LDAP.ø

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