email data base question?

[1200Bandit]

Hi Everyone,
Question, my custome was wondering if she could set up a way for visiters to her site to set up their own e-mail account. IE: user@HerSite.com and use it to send an receive emails.

This would be a way to increase traffic to the site, and keep people coming back daily.

I have seen this on other sites like budweiser.com,(you can set up your own email address like..1200Bandit@budweiser.com) and I'ts not a bad idea.

What is this type of program called? Pearl? Shareware (well known)? Have you ever used/posted one?

Thanks, John


As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[1200Bandit]

Ok? Please, I still need some help. Thanx

As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[paulwood]

Try here

http://www.bigmailbox.com/

for a third party way of doing this, but check out the terms thoroughly.

 

[1200Bandit]

I have found this so far

http://www.squirrelmail.org/

The documentation seems to be very confusing though.

As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[ChrisHunt]

Not sure how to do this, but beware. It seems to me that spammers could use it to send out their rubbish from your client's server. I'd want to be careful about who I gave email accounts to.

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.extracon.com

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[cian]

Does she run her own mail server? might be a good place to start.
You can get free mail servers such as James from Apache.org etc (a quick google search will find lots), then apply to it a web interface such as Squirrel (or another free one, check google or Sourceforge).




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[1200Bandit]

Update....

I found that this (SquirrelMail)is a part of the server set-up. You need shell acsess.

No good for a Web-Site hosted on someone elses server, But most of the security aspects that were mentioned in this thread have all ready been addressed by the software designers.
John

As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[Duplicity]

You'd need two inter-related systems; an emailing app and user authentication.

The user authentication would be used to allow initial account setup and to require subsequent logins (username and password) to access the webmail app.

This would help prevent abuse by spammers but it seems to me to be a lot of work for something thqat many hosts already support. Why not create an onlin epplication form for your clients site visitors to fill out, and after they fill it out the results can be used to create a webmail account at your clients domain.

Many hosts support a number of webmail accounts with a domain and even if they don't, the cost to upgrade to such a service would far outweigh any development costs to code up a bespoke system, not to mention the very impolrtant point that you leave the security headaches to the host, not you/your client.

The application form your clients visitors would fill in can have as much or as little detail as necessary, but you have to keep things realistsic. The last thing your client wants is for this to backfire and have a stray site visitor setting up a spamming account, using up valuable bandwidth in the process. Perhaps the accounts could be reserved for existing customers of your client.

The webmail accounts would be set up alopng the lines of a POP3 email account; name@domain name.co.uk or whatever.

At least it keeps you marginally in control over who has what. Most web hosts will also offer some kind of control panel and you can often limit how many emails may be sent on a monthly basis, as well as file sizes for attachments and similar. This kind of feature is often available with some business hosting accounts, so it could be worth a call to your host and have a chat with them.