PHP Private Message (PM) System

Question

I am planning making a PM system for my users, overall it seems easy enough, but the way I have seen tutorials making PM systems, there is one problem.

In the way i planned it to work, there would be rows like, user_from, user_to and then the message - user_from would be the sender, and will see the message in his send messages, user_to will be the receiver and will see the message in his inbox. BUT, what if a user wants to delete a message from their sent folder, but the other user does not want to delete it from their inbox ??

Is there any simple way doing this ?

It could also be nice, to have the messages in conversations, like Gmail and Facebook, but that is maybe to hard to code (any tutorials appreciated)?

Answer 1

Use what's called a soft delete. This means when a record is 'deleted' it is never actually removed from the database but rather a flag is set to delete which allows you to remove it from a user interface while still having access to the data when you need it. So for this situation you could create two more columns called user_to_delete and user_from_delete. When either of these is set to true you would know not to show the message in the respective user's inbox/outbox. Goodluck.