PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th Ed-tqw-_darksiderg

Reading Mail
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Reading Mail
After the user has set up some accounts, you can move on to the main game: connecting
to these accounts and reading mail.
Selecting an Account
The user needs to select one of his accounts to read mail from.The currently selected
account is stored in the $selected_account session variable.
If the user has a single account registered in the system, it will be automatically
selected when he logs in, as follows:
if(number_of_accounts($_SESSION['auth_user'])==1) {
$accounts = get_account_list($_SESSION['auth_user']);
$_SESSION['selected_account'] = $accounts[0];
}
The number_of_accounts() function, from mail_fns.php, works out whether the user
has more than one account; this function is shown in Listing 29.7.The
get_account_list() function retrieves an array of the user’s account IDs. In this case,
there is exactly one, so you can access it as the array’s 0 value.
Listing 29.7 number_of_accounts() Function from mail_fns.php—Function to
Work Out How Many Accounts a User Has Registered
function number_of_accounts($auth_user) {
// get the number of accounts that belong to this user
$query = "select count(*) from accounts where
username = '".$auth_user."'";
if($conn=db_connect()) {
$result = $conn->query($query);
if($result) {
$row = $result->fetch_array();
return $row[0];
}
}
return 0;
}
The get_account_list() function is similar to the get_accounts() function you
looked at before except that it retrieves only the account names.
If a user has multiple accounts registered, he will need to select one to use. In this
case, the headers contain a SELECT option that lists the available mailboxes. Choosing the
appropriate one automatically displays the mailbox for that account.You can see this in
Figure 29.5.