HELP: good solution to display email?

[jrandall]

NOTE: i'm open to other solutions such as php, but i'm most comfortable authoring asp.

i'm trying to add a feature to my site that will allow users to view inbox contents of a pop3 email inbox as they please.

i'm also open to other ways to go about doing this.

essentially we have a group of users who interact over email with each other and also tack on a site email address (discussion@thedomain.com) in the cc list. what i'd like is to have all these messages available for view on the site in case someone wants to go back and re-read something they might have deleted.

so what i've envisioned is to have some page accessible that will automatically log into this email account and display the inbox contents. the user would not have to know the username, password, etc- they'd just be able to browse the email.

i guess it's kind of like a message board but not really. the key is that the interaction is done over email and i just want to be able to have this available real-time online.

i haven't been able to find anything in asp that will allow this but have read about some 3rd party components (jmail i believe is one?) that can be used, but that requires support from the hosting company, which is not ideal.

is there a better way to go about doing this? i'd also thought of having some script that would somehow monitor the email address and suck incoming mails into some db that would then be accessible easily by asp. but i wouldn't have a clue how to author that script also.

HELP!

please, feel free to offer suggestions or ask more questions for clarification. thanks in advance!

[PeOfEo]

It would be easier to give them outlook accounts. Or is your heart set on webmail?

[jrandall]

no. the site is separate from the email threads. everybody has their own personal emails (whether it be a hotmail account, work email, or isp). a 'discussion' pop3 account just cc'ed on each email to the group by everybody in the group, so essentially all these email 'discussion threads' end up sent to this pop3 account. i don't want the ability to send webmail with this pop3 account, i just want a website to post the contents of its inbox to ANYBODY who wants to read it. (without knowing the username/password, etc)

does this explain it better? let me know what's not clear about this.

[PeOfEo]

Oh I see. I would not know how to do that unless you were hosting the pop3 server. If its like hosted by hotmail then that would be impossible. You are hosting the pop3 on the server that is hosting the site correct?

[jrandall]

yes. the 'discussion' account is being hosted by my hosting company, so i have full access to this account as far as accessing it through pop3 and whatnot. i'm trying to figure out a way to access it through asp or some other method and have the inbox contents displayed for anyone to read. i have the username, password, host, etc, which i can hard-code into the asp page that would display the emails, but just need to know how that can be done.

is this a better explanation?

can it be done in asp?

[PeOfEo]

I would guess it could be done with any server side language. If the mail is stored in a data base or something then sure. But how do you do it, I haven't the sligtest idea. Sounds like a challenging task. I would guess you would need to look into a tutorial on how to setup webmail and use some of the scripts to create this or find someone who know how to do what you are looking for. If whole webmail systems can be done with asp then something that displays email certainly can.