Introduction

Posterity is a web-based email system. Unlike most open source webmail applications Posterity is not just a web interface for accessing email messages stored on separate legacy IMAP servers. Instead Posterity uses its own database based mail storage.

By using a specially design storage backend Posterity can avoid many of the problems encountered by other webmail applications. By controlling the way data is stored and indexed it is possible to do things that would be impossible using a standard IMAP server as storage backend.

Contents

1   Features

Open source
Posterity is released under the BSD license.
Modern and user friendly web interface
A modern looking user interface that is compatible with all popular web browsers.
Mail filters
Incoming mails matching certain criteria can automatically be tagged, archived or deleted.
Downloading mail from POP3 servers
Messages can be downloaded from external POP3 server into a Posterity mail account.
Internationalized
The user interface is currently available in English, Swedish and German.
Conversations and tags
Most mail systems let users organize their mails by storing them in different folders. In Posterity related messages are automatically grouped into something called conversations. Conversations can in turn be organized by attaching one or more tags.
Relational data model
Instead of just being a front-end to a imap-server Posterity stores emails in a dedicated relational database. By not being limited to the imap protocol and a potentially slow imap-server Posterity can do queries and manipulate data in ways not possible with a classic imap-server backend.
Scalable
The Posterity mail storage is designed to cope with large amounts of mail. A user should never be forced to delete messages for performance reasons.
Import existing messages
Existing messages can be imported into a posterity account either individually or whole (mbox) folders.
HTML emails
Before HTML messages are display the content is filtered and potentially dangerous parts are removed.

2   Goals

Here are a few goals and guidelines to guide the future development of Posterity:

Lightweight and extendable
The system core should be kept small and lightweight. Additional non-essential functionality should be implemented in the form of plug-ins.
Fast and scalable
The architecture should efficiently handle large amounts of data and the user interface must stay responsive and easy to use independent of the amount of data stored.
User friendly
The user interface should make the user's interaction as intuitive as possible. Standards adherence, browser compatibility and accessibility should be prioritized tasks.