Mail Retrieval

How can I offer e-mail retrieval from my website?

How can I offer e-mail retrieval from my website?

I dont understnad your question but let me explain what I understand

For email to be sent or recieved there has to be sendmail or some form of a mail deamon running on the server. When you sign up with a web host such as Geocities or Netfirms, they give you a certian amount of storage for your web site, they might then alow you access to CGI, PHP or ASP if they have that instaled on their server and your hosting plan covers that, they might also give you a pop email or web email acount.

A pop email acount is accessed with a email client such as outlook express, a web mail on the otherhand can be accessed through the use of an online form.

As an example, yahoo have a online email system, where you log in, and with the use of forms, you fill in certian information such as subject, address, and message, and once you click send, it gets sent to either a CGI script, PHP or something like that, and it would be the CGI script that would then issue the commands to the sendmail deamon running on whatever port, lets say port 25. then sendmail would process the email, and decides what to do next.

If you signed up for geocities or some other web host like netfirms, you may have your own private email, pop or web, but this is only for you. And to access that there would be instructions. But if you wanted to alow visitors to your site to log in to their acounts and retrieve emails, I dont think this would be alowed by the host. I think there would be restrictions.

However what you could do is download server software such as Apache, then install it, configure it. Then download some form of sendmail or simular mail deamon, and set that up too. Then your server would need PHP, CGI or some other server side script that will process the email forms and issue the commands to sendmail.

I dont know if a pop acount can be accesssed though a web page with the use of a form or not. If you hapen to have CGI access or PHP access then you could write a loging form, complete with authentification, and would have to be secure to protect peoples passwords. Then useing your server side script you can process the email.

I hope this answers your question

I'm pretty sure there is a script involved with e-mail recovery or retrieval, but you might wanna search google for cgi or php mail scripts.

That is an awfully broad question TW. If you’re offering accounts and would like to keep support to a min. Id suggest you use an html interface for sending and receiving. There are many isp's that don’t allow smtp outside their network. If your supporting it you could be swamped with calls asking why they can't send their mail with outlook or another client even when its configured correctly.

Squirrel Mail has a pleasing interface, which works nicely with the UofW's imap server. Exchange has a good html user interface but its slow as hell. It all depends what your doing, how much you want to spend and what OS you prefer to use. If you have a small operation and don't want to spend much money argosoft has an inexpensive mail server (windows) that offers pop and/or webmail

I wanna set up something along the lines of what JP has for antionline.com e-mail addresses. I own the site down-time.net and would like to allow people to check thier mail from my site. I also would really like to put up an IRC client, but I'm having enough problems learning this stuff as is.

Oh.. In that case, go to bigmailbox.com and signup for that nice service. User's will be able to signup for their own Name@down-time.net email address. Bigmailbox need's you to have a certain number of user's to be able to have it or some form(s?) of regulation. Hope I helped, and Happy Birthday Tek! :)