While I share your skepticism for PHP the language, PHP is a very mature platform with well understood deployment modes.<p>As an example, I run one of the applications mentioned here for several customers in chrooted read-only no-exec environments without fuss. The platform gives me good tools for instrumentation and logging in order to work proactively withever operations issues that arise.<p>Even if your (or mine) favourite language had a community large enough to develop great webmail tools, very few has a deployment story to match.