Sounds like a web-driven procmail for regular folks! Good idea.
Sounded interesting until I read the part about it being written in PHP. Everything I’ve read about the language makes me think of it as poorly written language and interpreter.
Uh - you do realize you’re soaking in it?
PHP was accreted rather than being designed, which is how you get languages that snobs hate and people in the trenches love. If you try it, you might like it; you do need constant access to the web docs but that’s OK - it’s a web language, only useful in the context of ubiquitous Internet access.
Yeah BB, how dare you code your site in php! I’m leaving forever, because php. I demand you replace the bbs, which is almost certainly coded in php, with a system where we send comments in via snail mail to be lovingly typed out by @Falcor
Also, on topic: Doesn’t Mozilla’s Thunderbird do most of these things and handle IMAP as well?
Soaking in it? Is that you, Madge? I don’t care if Boing Boing or it’s forums are written in PHP - my email isn’t stored there.
As for designed verses accreted, while, say, Pythonistas may look down their nose at Perl, I think they wouldn’t say it was poorly designed or implemented. I’m talk about gross inconsistencies in the language and bugs.
Regardless of how popular it is, when it comes to serious web apps that deal with very personal data, I think it’s only a matter of time before someone regrets that language choice.
Ummmmm they’re not storing anything: are you sure you know how IMAP works?
I stand corrected… It does run on your server but since you’re signing in with your own credentials it’s a matter of someone having those. A hacker couldn’t just submit queries to the database as can be done with websites in php because sites expect a public exchange, whereas this would be entirely user-facing.
@KarlS nice catch 
Pretty clever.
Yes, but as I understand it, the main point is mock server-side processing. You can centralize all those filters and they be applied no matter which client you use or whether you remember to check your mail at all.
I don’t care that it’s written in PHP; I don’t care that the full version costs $25. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for so I don’t have to learn procmail and royally screw up my mail by making mistakes in procmail’s fiddly config files. Thanks for sharing @doctorow !
No, it isn’t. It’s Ruby on Rails.
Whitelisting. Automatically send challenge emails to unknown senders to require them to verify their identity before the message appears in your inbox. Unverified senders are held in a review folder.
If you do this you are a selfish spamming d-bag. It’s called a challenge-response system, and people hate them because they don’t work well and waste the sender’s time.
It’s basically Hitler spam. Just as the author said in your link, when I encounter a challenge-response email (got one on Tuesday, I did) I happily delete that email and the associated address from my address book.
I’m sure glad you made it clear that you aren’t actually at all knowledgeable about PHP or personally experienced in using the language before slamming it in a public forum. Otherwise people might think you were a typical Java programmer. 
When I read http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/, although it is ranty the things be brings up seem to be valid and not just problems with differences of opinion but a rather a lot of inconsistency and bad design. And they are numerous. Perhaps many have been fixed by now. But usually it is hard to fix bad design.
I’m a systems guy (UNIX, storage) so sure, you can dismiss what I say as ignorant. But I would much rather have a point-by-point dissection of the above posting as a way of convincing me that PHP isn’t poorly designed and implemented.
And don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean it isn’t also useful and wildly popular. Hell, I’d say it has its place. Everyone is free to decide what part of their data is stored in applications written in any language or on any particular technology.
But now that I’ve dug up the article that I think does a fair job of criticising the language, can you be useful and point out a resource that defends it at this level?
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