Mailview

What is Mailview

Mailview is a PHP program to view email.
I searched for a simple and easy webmail application which was:

Fast
Properly supported threaded view.
Doesn’t require a database.

I could not find any so I wrote my own. This actually took me less time than finding an application that worked for me :-/

What Mailview is not

A fullblown email/webmail client.
A program to send email.
A program to do other kind of fancy stuff with your email.

In short: It is *only* intended to view your email, nothing more or less.

Features

Simple, fast.
Supports IMAP (POP3 does not work at the moment).
Standard compliant:
XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.1
RFC’s 822, 1521, 1522, 2017, 2822, 2045-2049, 1149
Runs out-of-the box (Configuration is possible but optional).
Easy to extend or modify.

Screenshots

Download

Latest version:
16 August 2009 – mailview-1.2.tar.gz

Previous versions:
10 Juli 2008 – mailview-1.1.tar.gz
2 April 2008 – mailview-1.0.tar.gz

Requirements

A webserver
php 5 or higher, php 4 will not work!
http://www.php.net
php pcre extension
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php#pcre.installation
php session extension
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.session.php#session.installation
php imap extension
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.imap.php#imap.installation
php iconv extension
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.iconv.php#iconv.installation

Installation

Extract the files to your www directory and you’re good to go!

If you want, you can configure mailview by editing configuration.php, this is not required though.
An example file is provided (configuration.php.dist).

Changelog

1.2 (Januari 2009)

Changed license to Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported because I found out I’m unable to place anything in the public domain by Dutch law.
Fixed bug with special characters not always being displayed correctly (Thanks to Ján Šmatlík for reporting).
Email addresses are now “sniffed” and linked (Like URLs).
Minor changes in default template.

1.1 (10 Juli 2008)

Fixed default style in IE.
Few minor issues in the default style.
Disabled POP3 for now since it does not seem to work very well.
Add (slightly) more graceful error/warning message handling.
New Option: DEBUG—To enable debug mode with more verbose output.
New option: TZ—For setting the timezone.
New option: SEPARATOR—Set IMAP directory separator (defaults to ‘.’)
Option VAL (Validate ssl certificate) defaults to False now.
PASS option can be used securely now.

1.0 (2 April 2008)

Initial release.

Notes

Keep in mind that Mailview was and is mainly written for personal purposes, which means that features I use have high priority, and other features I don’t use (i.e. pop3) have a low priority. This doesn’t mean I won’t accept patches and/or will try my best to help people out if they have a problem.

To do

Note: Mailview is not really developed anymore, this list is here for informative purposes.

I18N.
Open Maildir/mbox directly from the filesystem without using a IMAP connection.
Pre-generate and/or cache mailbox fetch results and/or HTML output instead of using PHP to fetch messages each time.
Search function.
Support RFC 1896 (text/enriched) and RFC 2557 (MHTML).
Fix POP3.
Better help file, more in-page help.

Low(er) priority

Let the user decide which headers to view.
Mixed index/pager view (like mutt’s $pager_index_lines).
Let the user sort emails by author, date, subject, ect.
PGP and S/MIME support
Test NNTP and fix if necessary, the php imap extension should support this.

Bugs

Undoubtedly, but no serious ones are known.

Authors

Martin Tournoij <carpetsmoker@rwxrwxrwx.net>

Mailview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License [external link] .
threads.php was taken from Horde and is GPL.