RE: [cobalt-developers] Web Mail

[Sales - Way to the Web <sales@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Jeff,

> I've decided to add we-based email for the small ISP I just bought.  I
> can do it just about free on NT since I own an unlimited license to
> Mailtraq Webmail Edition ("http://www.mailtraqna.com/"; (but I 
> suppose I
> should warn you, it's my company <smile>).

I remember ;-)

> Which of your products will give us a complete web-based experience,
> sort of like hotmail?
> 
> Does any of your products allow clients to read both with their
> traditional email client AND with their browser?  Are any of your
> solutions IMAP based?
> 
> Thanks for the help; go ahead, do it onlist, I think there are other
> readers here too who are interested.

Oh, go on then ... (warning - long email)

Apologies to those who aren't interested.

MailNow ( http://www.mailnow.co.uk ) provides the "hotmail" experience. It
doesn't provide access via email client, but only through the browser (we're
considering developing a RaQ3 specific product that creates the POP accounts
too, but would be some way off into the future). It doesn't work with IMAP
accounts either as the demand so far has been all but non-existant :-) What
you can do is retrieve email from an alternative POP account into your
MailNow account.

For ISP services, we would recommend considering the following:

If you want to provide web-based email services to clients you would need to
consider restricted access to the perl scripts since they're non-obfuscated
and, though I'm sure everyones users are very honest, you don't want them
"borrowing" your paid for licensed copy and running off with it to another
host ;-)

One solution would be to provide the kind of service that the
free-web-based-email companies do when they ask for a sub-domain and MX
record redirection to them. In other words, you could create the client a
virtual server webmail.clientsdomain.com and install the product there.
There's no need to mess with their MX record, obviously, but they should be
able to "borrow" said scripts so easily.

Another solution is to install the product multiple times on a single domain
of your own (webmail.ourservice.com) and configure it to use to access the
clients POP3 catchall account.

Finally, you can also offer multiple domains from a single installation, so
visitors can have a choice of domains for their email address if you so
desire.

How does it work?

MailNow sends email using either SMTP sockets or SENDMAIL. SENDMAIL is
recommended on UNIX-type platforms since it queues mail and is therefore
more efficient on system resources and user response time to the interface.
The product retrieves email using the POP3 protocol from the clients POP3
catchall account. This does not have to be located on the same server. The
user data is stored in a directory hierarchy which we always recommend you
place outside of the web server directory tree for security purposes.

Incidentally, for those with problems with catchall accounts on RaQ3's - I
cannot remember if this has already been covered, but you can work around
the problem of email only going to the catchall when defined and not other
POP3 accounts by entering an alias of the same name as the  POP3 account for
each account!

More information can be gleaned from out website at:
http://www.mailnow.co.uk

...and from contacting us :-)

Regards,
Jonathan Michaelson

Way to the Web Ltd
Web Hosting, E-Commerce and CGI Scripting
http://www.waytotheweb.com