In the never-ending stream of article series that comes out of DevShed, they've started up a new one today with part one of a look at creating an email client with PHP and implementing the full email functionality (reading/writing/attachments/etc).

In this four-part series of articles we are going to build an email client with PHP. I will try to implement a full email client with all the functionality that you would expect from an email client, which includes a trash folder, sent items folder and a draft folder. But that's not all.

In part one, they set things up - talking about how it will all work (using the PHPMailer class) and the creating of the database tables to store the data for the app including the messages and the user information.