storing emails

[redzzzon]

Hello everyone

I have been working on a site that may grow someday. I would like to know how do I store emails in an account. Are emails stored in a table of a specific user table created at the time of the new account where primary_key is emailID.

Or are all emails stored under one table and and emailID is primary key and userID is forieng key.

When a new account is set up at yahoo is a new table set or perhaps a database object created or are emails inserted into a table chronologicaly then select based on where userid = $userid.

I have searched everywhere using keywords like "yahoo""hotmail" study" "email" "storage" "mysql" "entity relationship"

Thanks Much
Tom

[TheDefender]

I personally have not ever looked into this, but here's a tip for you... Try going to Hotscripts.com. They have web-based email client software. You could download a few of them, and pick them apart to see how they do it.

I suspect it's not a new table each time. That would become very very problematic and unmanageable when you have many users.

[Frederick]

Store the emails with the users profile information. Then you can use the email for login reference or username/password. You can choose.
Make the items more flexible for sending newsletters, login, directory listing, etc.

Never use an email as the primary key, always use a unique number like auto-increment because if for some reason you get duplicate ID's, you will get an insert failure.