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.
- 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.
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.