[CLUE-Tech] PHP question for Grant

[Timothy C. Klein]

Hey,

This talk about PHP has me wondering.  I have just barely started to
look into developing a web mail-interface for my home machine. (As in a
MUA that is embedded in or is a web page, with the mail residing in
normal form on my machine)  SSH and mutt sure would be the easiest, but
I spend 40 hours a week behind a braindead corporate proxy that only
allows telnet out-bound.  I don't let telnet in on my machine, so that
is out.

So, I have found a package called mhonarc that can make my mailboxes
into html, and this could be scripted, but I am thinkng of something
that might be a bit more interactive.  (Ie, send and delete from within
a web page, threading of messages is a must, multiple mail boxes).

Now I am a web development newbie.  Any thought on what would be best
for this?  Should I try to create some scipts with bash or pearl that
get mhonarc to do the job (which is seems like it would, but kinda
kludgy--It is really a program for archiving).  Would PHP be able to
help with something like this, or is it strictly for databases?  Or
should I just write a Java applet?  (That would probably be some work.)
Or would CGI and C be the best? Whatever the solution, a mail parsing
library is a must, as I don't really feal like doing all that myself,
too error prone and time-consuming.

Of course there are serious security considerations here that would have
to be addressed before I could turn this up, so the tool must also allow
some kind of strong encryption and authentication.  But all in all, this
sounds like a fun project that will 'scratch an itch' to use the words of
ESR.

Thanks for any input,
Tim

On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 04:43:02PM -0700, Kevin Cullis wrote:
> Grant,
> 
> I saw on a recent post that you're using PHP and you like it.  What
> benefits do you see from using it?  The reason?  An organization wants
> to put together a web site and we're deciding on some technologies, and
> I'm for Open Source, of course, and I'm looking for ammo to promote
> Linux as a good solution as well a promote Open Source to new people. 
> Any feedback you can give would be helpful.
> 
> Kevin
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