Question

I’m writing a simplified version of an email system on a site I’m creating.

The basic premise is users can message each other on the site, best example would be ebay, you can message other users on the site itself and it basically acts as an email system.

What I have is the messages themselves, who they’re from, to and the text.

I would also like to have basic “read/not read” and “deleted”, possibly even “sent” categories.

something like this:

table structure:

id, to, from, subject, body, dateTime

What I’d like to know is if it makes more sense to just add a “read” and “deleted” column to that table, and search for those particular conditions, when I need them on the site, or if it is more efficient/best practice to have another “categories” table and then have a join table putting a message id with category id, and then using that join table to serve up the info when it’s requested?

If my question doesn’t make sense forgive me, I’m still pretty new at this stuff.

Answer 1

i would add two columns:

read tinyint(1),
deleted tinyint(1)

and use them as booleans.