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

686 Chapter 29 Building a Web-Based Email Service
Extending the Project
There are many extensions or improvements you could make to this project.You can
look to the mail reader you normally use for inspiration, but some useful additions are
the following:
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Add the ability for users to register with this site. (You could reuse some of the
code from Chapter 27,“Building User Authentication and Personalization,” for this
purpose.)
Add the ability for users to have many addresses. Many users have more than one
email address—perhaps a personal address and a work address. By moving their
stored email address from the users table to the accounts table, you could allow
them to use many addresses.You would need to change a limited amount of other
code, too.The send mail form would need a drop-down box to select which
address to use.
Add the ability to send, receive, and view mail with attachments. If users are to be
able to send attachments, you will need to build in file upload capabilities as discussed
in Chapter 19,“Interacting with the File System and the Server.” Sending
mail with attachments is covered in Chapter 30,“Building a Mailing List
Manager.”
Add address book capabilities.
Add network newsreading capabilities. Reading from an NNTP server using the
IMAP functions is almost identical to reading from a mailbox.You just need to
specify a different port number and protocol in the imap_open() call. Instead of
naming a mailbox such as INBOX, you name a newsgroup to read from instead.
You could combine this with the thread-building capabilities from the project in
Chapter 31,“Building Web Forums,” to build a threaded web-based newsreader.
Next
In the next chapter, you build another email-related project. In this one, you build an
application to support sending newsletters on multiple topics to people who subscribe
through your site.