PHP Web Based Email System

The Client

The business consulting firm in the UK who is concentrating on providing full range of IT technical and application supports in project coordination and management domain.

Overview

The client was planned to build an email system to realize the communicate function among three types of people: customers, agents, and vendors. The overview of all email communication information should be provided to all users in the web based system.

One specific requirement is the system should not reveal the real email address of both customers and vendors while the details of the sent and received emails were available to these three types of people.

Solutions

In the project development, we adopted the RUP process and analyzed the specification. The architecture was built successfully according to the system requirement. There are two configuration files to control this system on this web based platform. Emails must be pre-processed before being sent. To implement the specific requirement, the system converted the real email address of the sender into the client's email address and converted the client's email address to its real address in receiver's case. While the emails were in communication process, there is a copy of each email with unique identification to be sent into a specified mail box, so that the system could categorize all the emails and manage them under a particular project. In this condition, the system achieves the function that specifying who was allowed to communicate in a particular project. In this system, users can use the search feature of wildcards and strings. At intervals, project progress reports and other emails regarding a particular project were sent to the persons who were the customers of this project.

Technologies

Technologies: PHP, Apache, Rational Rose, Linux, etc.

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