Hi Everyone! I am in need of a way for internet users to have the ability to send and receive email using my website where their 3rd-party email address [gmail, yahoo, or whatever] is not disclosed to the sending party. I guess I need a system that is similar to what Facebook has for their email system... In other words, the people who sign up to my website will be able to contact other members through my email system, and the website, in lieu of displaying their email address to everyone.
Here are a few options that I have in front of me:
Any other ideas? I'm sort of partial to the second option because folks from the outside could send email to the user as well as the members of the site. Also, there are SPAM protections enabled for the second option, which is something that I would have to create for the option 3.
I'm a little uneasy about whether or not option 2 will work all of the time... I mean, what if my host beefs up the SPAM filter so that it rejects the email to folks who do not have an actual email account? That would be devastating, I think.
Currently, I am using the NET_POP3 module of the PEAR library to actually gather the emails... then, I am using a Class I found that parses the email and separates the attachments from the body of the message, and it also checks the MIME Type. Then, I have a cron job setup to check the catch all mail box every so often which will "read" the email and process it as needed. I don't know... is there a better way?
Here are a few options that I have in front of me:
- I could give every member an email address with my domain, but I'm limited to 1,000 email addresses
- I am able to utilize a "catch all" email address where I can use the usernames that the folks signed up with as the unique part of the email address and then have a PHP script process the email that is inside the "catch all" mailbox and forward it to whereever... in other words, dork@mydomain.com would not be an actual email address, but since I have this catch all address the user "dork" will receive the message
- I could use a completely enclosed email system where sending a message is just as simple as saving it in a database, but I would need for this to have the ability to also send an attachment
Any other ideas? I'm sort of partial to the second option because folks from the outside could send email to the user as well as the members of the site. Also, there are SPAM protections enabled for the second option, which is something that I would have to create for the option 3.
I'm a little uneasy about whether or not option 2 will work all of the time... I mean, what if my host beefs up the SPAM filter so that it rejects the email to folks who do not have an actual email account? That would be devastating, I think.
Currently, I am using the NET_POP3 module of the PEAR library to actually gather the emails... then, I am using a Class I found that parses the email and separates the attachments from the body of the message, and it also checks the MIME Type. Then, I have a cron job setup to check the catch all mail box every so often which will "read" the email and process it as needed. I don't know... is there a better way?
