How do I implement a messaging system for members of my website to communicate with each other?

Question

I have a fully functional website, to which I want to add the ability for members to email each other, kinda like facebook, but much smaller, so I won't need their need for huge traffic.

Basically I need a starting point. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

First step is to design the tables to store the mail objects.

One approach which works is to set up a mail "hasMany" children relationship, which basically means that a single mail object will have an id column and a self-referential parent_id column like this:

mail:
id , parent_id, create_time , from_user_id , to_user_id , textual_content

or something similar.