Offering Free Email

[chris2403]

Hi,

ive been looking into added value for my site visitors and think offering a free email service with my domain name would be good, ideally i want to host the software on my webspace which is a shared server but i may consider a dedicated server (ive been considering moving the site to one for ages).

does anyone know of software i can install that would allow a customer to sign up etc automatically (and basically does not require any intervention from me to setup a customers account), offers customer webmail and pop access, and preferably is cheap/free.

ive had a look at reseller accounts etc but they all look more hassle than they are worth.

with all the different software for website around now there must be something.

thanks in advance

chris

[happy_hands]

I'm surprised you're looking at dedicated servers, but aren't interested in reseller accounts (in my experience, the former is always much more expensive than the latter).

I'd recommend going down the reseller account route. I had one with web-fusion for a while, which worked well with countless additional POP3 accounts, set up easily through the control panel.

I've now moved all my hosting to a reseller account with Heart Internet. As a result, every domain can be accessed individually by the client, to add as many additional POP3 accounts, a good webmail for each POP3, email forwarding addresses, extra ftp accounts, MySQL servers, etc. as I want to allow them (up to an unlimited number!).

I'm not sure of what is 'more effort than it's worth' with this, as I find them incredibly easy to set up, as do my clients.

[Compguy Pete]

I would have to fully agree with Happy here... A reseller account or something like that will be much cheaper in the log run.

One thing your going to want to keep in mind is bandwidth allowances and space. When your currently looking at services like gmail or yahoo who offer more than 2gb of space you might want to consider limiting that to a lot less. Of course this depends on how many users you plan on having or limiting.