Offering an email service

Paullas · May 24, 2006

I am thinking of offering an email service on one of my domains. I was pointed to hivemail, has anyone used this or seen any good/bad comments about this or can anyone recomend anything better

bb99 · May 24, 2006

I did this a while back...

I did look at Hivemail - it looks quite cool but it is no longer being developed (which isn't that big an issue).

I wrote a custom sign up script that allowed users to check availability against the domain names available and then sign up (it all went through instantly by using payment through Nochex and because our email accounts are done in a MySQL table).

Deciding on the actual webmail system was quite a difficult one...

I toyed with a number of packages but settled on IMP (part of Horde). It is quite fiddly to set up but it's been rock solid. The newer version has a front end in development called DIMP which brings in a few cool AJAX features. You can also use some of the other Horde stuff to give the users a calendar, address book and virtual filestore.

My second choice was DWmail - this is a lot less complex than IMP. It's only £20. Pretty good though.

I recently saw Roundcube which looks pretty cool and is very Web 2.0. It's still in Beta but it does look reasonably solid.

There are plenty of other webmail clients out there... Off the top of my head Squirrelmail is very popular, but I never liked the feel of it and I couldn't find a decent skin for it.

Paullas · May 24, 2006

cheers bb i will take a look at them. i am willing to pay but want to get this right first time.

thanks again

bb99 · May 24, 2006

The other thing about Hivemail that put me off was that, if I remember rightly, it requires you to setup a catchall for the domain name and then stores all the emails in MySQL.

This is fine if you've got your own server and are never planning to move to something else. But if you then change packages you won't be able to (easily) export all the mailboxes.

I think that's the case anyway... I can't remember and I can't be bothered to check.

If you are prepared to pay, there are some very cool packages out there that already have things like sign up and paypal integration in addition to all the webmail stuff... I can't for the life of me remember any of their names though. If you do a Google for "webmail software" or similar then they will undoubtedly be the feckers paying top dollar for the adverts on the right.