Actually, doing something like this would only add a false sense of security. If I were a mailicious mail admin, I could capture a copy of your message, use the info in the header to unwrap the message, and you'd never be the wiser.
The reason this analogy breaks down is that in physical postal mail, there is one physical object being delivered. In e-mail, it is a stream of data that is being replicated across many systems (and generally deleted from each system after it gets passed to the next one).
Frankly, if it is illegal to look at email messages for the purpose of debugging mail routing problems, I'm in deep doo-doo, because I and my staff do it on a regular basis. We have no interest in the content of the message, and we have no intent to monitor content, but the fact is that 99% of e-mail messages have plaintext content attached to the headers that we need to read to be able to debug routing issues.
For what it's worth, Cornell University supports University-wide mail on a set of Sun Enterprise servers using Sendmail as the MTA, and cyrus for POP and IMAP service. I don't know offhand what the current count of active users on the system is, but generally speaking the Cornell community is 30,000 people, almost all of whom use electronic mail on a regular basis.
Our service is primarily POP-based. We support IMAP connections, but not the full suite of IMAP services that would truly support a centralized mail storage facility. (Just not enough hardware for that at the moment.)
In any case, we've developed an extremely reliable service at this level, and the only part of the system that isn't open source is the OS.
If anyone would like more details on how we do what we do, or why we made certain choices (i.e. which MTA to use, which IMAPd/POPd, etc.), feel free to contact me.
Php and Zope are two different sort of things. I would call Zope an application server. I wouldn't call PHP an application server, although you can do a lot of the same things with it.
I use PHP, and I am looking at using Zope, and I can see places where both have strengths. In a lot of ways, it is a difference between some sort of templating system/server-side scripting system (Php, Perl-with-your-favorite-modules, SSI, etc.) vs. an integrated serving package like Zope.
Whether you prefer the former or the latter I would think depends on a) how much you enjoy programming and b) whether the content development is being done by one person, or is heavily distributed. Packages like Zope tend to insulate you from coding (at least until you need to go beyond the basic packages), and are usually built to facilitate heavily distributed content management.
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Actually, doing something like this would only add
a false sense of security. If I were a mailicious mail admin, I could capture a copy of your message, use the info in the header to unwrap the message, and you'd never be the wiser.
The reason this analogy breaks down is that in physical postal mail, there is one physical object being delivered. In e-mail, it is a stream of data that is being replicated across many systems (and generally deleted from each system after it gets passed to the next one).
Frankly, if it is illegal to look at email messages for the purpose of debugging mail routing problems, I'm in deep doo-doo, because I and my staff do it on a regular basis. We have no interest in the content of the message, and we have no intent to monitor content, but the fact is that 99% of e-mail messages have plaintext content attached to the headers that we need to read to be able to debug routing issues.
For what it's worth, Cornell University supports University-wide mail on a set of Sun Enterprise servers using Sendmail as the MTA, and cyrus for POP and IMAP service. I don't know offhand what the current count of active users on the system is, but generally speaking the Cornell community is 30,000 people, almost all of whom use electronic mail on a regular basis.
Our service is primarily POP-based. We support IMAP connections, but not the full suite of IMAP services that would truly support a centralized mail storage facility. (Just not enough hardware for that at the moment.)
In any case, we've developed an extremely reliable service at this level, and the only part of the system that isn't open source is the OS.
If anyone would like more details on how we do what we do, or why we made certain choices (i.e. which MTA to use, which IMAPd/POPd, etc.), feel free to contact me.
Php and Zope are two different sort of things. I would call Zope an application server. I wouldn't call PHP an application server, although you can do a lot of the same things with it.
I use PHP, and I am looking at using Zope, and I can see places where both have strengths. In a lot of ways, it is a difference between some sort of templating system/server-side scripting system (Php, Perl-with-your-favorite-modules, SSI, etc.) vs. an integrated serving package like Zope.
Whether you prefer the former or the latter I would think depends on a) how much you enjoy programming and b) whether the content development is being done by one person, or is heavily distributed. Packages like Zope tend to insulate you from coding (at least until you need to go beyond the basic packages), and are usually built to facilitate heavily distributed content management.