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:

• Add the ability for users to register with this site. (You could reuse some of the code from Chapter 24, "Building User Authentication and Personalization," for this purpose.)

• 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 from 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 16, "Interacting with the File System and the Server." Sending mail with attachments is covered in Chapter 28, "Building a Mailing List Manager."

• Add address book capabilities.

• Add network news reading abilities. 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 like INBOX, you name a newsgroup to read from instead. You could combine this with the thread-building capabilities from the project in Chapter 29, "Building Web Forums," to build a threaded Web-based newsreader.