How To Offer Email Services To Visitors

Like hotmail

[jmorti]

Hey guys. A few years back I had a site that allowed visitors to get their own email at my sites domain. I think I had it setup on a thrid party. Does anyone know how to setup an automated service? It would be great fot all the community site owners. Thanks.

[rogerd]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, jmorti. I don't have an answer to the question - does anyone know if there's a user-friendly script to automate email setup?

I DO think you are exposing yourself to major abuse issues by offering such capability. Spammers, harassers, etc. could work from your domain and end up putting the whole thing on blacklists. If you do go ahead with the plan, I'd recommend putting limits on the mail volume and monitoring activity closely to shut down problem accounts before they wreak too much havoc.

[davec]

There are plenty of scripts that can do this. I'm not sure of all, but two I'm aware of are gossamer mail and hivemail. You can google for them.

d

[roycerus]

I researched a lot on this. Found socketmail to be the best but eventually my forum visitors said they didn't care about email cause they already have one [or more].

[Mistra]

I tried BigMailBox once. That was many years ago. They canceled my account due to lack of sign up. With only 6MB of space who would like to sign up with BigMailBox today when you can get unlimited space with Google's Gmail, 250MB with Hotmail, and 1GB with Yahoo?

Furthermore, users will unlikely use your domain unless you are a big company like Yahoo.

Just think about yourself for one second. Which one will you give to your friend - an email with Yahoo or an email sign up with a web site started by an individual who could cancel his site anytime soon?

Also please beware that this type of email account might interest those Nigerian scammers who sign up with you to scam others. They also can use it to spam others and give your web site or company a bad name.

Anyway, I don't mean to discourage you. I just hope you have considered the advantages and disadvantages and also the consequences of giving free email account. Have you tried Ubiemail? I use this for my personal email. If you want users to sign up by themselves then I think you need to do some tweaking with the source code. Good luck with your endeavours.

[rogerd]

I think if your site relates to a particular theme and is perceived as being cool, some users might sign up for an email account. As Mistra notes, though, the advantages of the big mail providers will probably keep most users with them.

And there's a probability of "adverse selection", i.e., some portion of the people who DO sign up will do so because they want to do something that they don't think they'll get away with at other providers.