Anyone offering free email at their site?

[Vitis]

Hi,
I'd like to offer free email to users and a way for them to login and check their mail from vitisearch.com

Does anyone have a good solution for this that doesn't cost an arm or a leg?
Michel

[Bruceper]

There are lots of options, Check out hotscripts at the url below for some webmail scripts. There are paid and free scripts available.

http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Script...ail/index.html

[FSGDAG]

Just as a side note.... Be careful with allowing just anyone to sign up for a free e-mail account...

Spammer will take full advantage of this and it will be hard to police it. Before you know it, your domain will end up on a black list and you wont be able to send out legitimate e-mails from your own account

[Bruceper]

If you have a good enough domain and enough traffic, I would suggest that you offer email aliases or paid email.

An alias means that someone could have mail sent to myname@vitisearch.com but the mail is forwarded to their own ISP. They could use myname@vitisearch.com to send mail with, but since they're using their own ISP to send the mail with then it mostly becomes not your problem.

In case of abuse your domain would be associated, but it is the sending IP address that gets blocked, not the email domain address. You would need to set up an abuse email address so you could terminate accounts that spammers are using.

A paid service would eliminate most dumb spammers as they don't want to pay.

Lastly, you can offer POP3 only and force the user to send mail with their ISP. Again this "removes" you from the spam chain and may be the way to go if you want to offer email accounts.

Make sure you use a script that can send bounces back to the proper address and not to you. Also make sure that your script has good logging capabilities so you can check each and every account for usage.

And lastly, remember to keep on top of security issues such as patches.