Hi, Just need a quick run overview on whats needed to develop an online email hosting/accounts website, such like gmail and hotmail. I got a client whos asked for a quote for developing the system, just wanted to see howmuch effort and what kind of stuff is needed for the site. First things first, What kind of programming will be required? EG: PHP, SQL, JAVA, CGI Its a project i'm forwarding to my development team and i just wanted to see howmuch work and what is needed to be learned to be able to pull of somthing decent. What kind of back end functions will it require? Is it possible to create/delete email accounts via PHP and view/send/edit emails within the website created. Secondly, is there any premade scripts/software out there so we can have a look at the code (Obviously not copy/reproduce it) just to see the way its programed. All in all, what is needed software and hardware wise to reproduce somthing like Gmail, when people can make there own email and be able to access there messages and such within the website. Thanks for your help, Rich
There's several ways of doing it, the simplest would be to just use the pop3/smtp functions on a server and access them with php. You could then have a script check the pop3 boxes every minute then update into an sql db or something if you want to allow users to have folders etc. Either that or imap, which would be easier, but be prepared to invest in disk space. Have a look at roundcube. To allow signup, you'd obv have to have a way of creating the pop3 boxes, maybe even using a control panel's API to begin with.