messaging app using mysql?

I'm writing an internal messaging system...looking for guidance

[distorto]

Hi. I'm writing an internal messaging application. I'm making something that will allow users who are logged in to a system send and receive messages from other registered users. This is not sending email to external email systems.
How do most people go about this?
My gut feeling is that it's nothing more than a table in a mysql database.

user ¦ recipient ¦ sent ¦ received ¦ date

with updates sent whenever a user has an item in the received box.
is it this simple?
Curious to hear how others have gone about this. All my initial work looking into the subject turned up a lot of info about php's mail() function and not much else.
thanks
s

[ChrisDean]

We're currently developing a similar app and I have to say that though we've modelled the functionality on that of facebook's message board it is still pretty much a single table as you describe.

We also have a foreign keyed table of common topics/categories to the messaging table, a archive table for storing old messages/threads and also a few tables to deal with the user management/permissions side of things.

A very simple system could easily be a single table, a complex system could be as large as phpBB...

[edited by: ChrisDean at 9:11 pm (utc) on July 9, 2007]

[distorto]

thanks

[alvin]

Hello All

I as well have a need for an internal messaging application. I would like to follow your projects, maybe I can help with one of them. Please let me know?

[edited by: jatar_k at 5:23 pm (utc) on July 20, 2007]
[edit reason] no urls thanks [/edit]

[stef25]

most likely you already have a User table, so maybe its best to put messages in a separate table and connect them using foreign keys - no? unless of course everything you are storing is in that one table