Providing Email Address @YourDomain

[DHewes]

This is an old conversation that has appeared on this and several other vB related forums over the 5+ years I have been working with the product. That said, several things have changed and I am seeking the advice from those with experience doing this. The products that were out there have changed as well. Here is the need:

1) Assumption: vB owner is hosting on a shared ISP and has SSH, FTP and web access to the account but not to the root of the server. vB owner does NOT have root access nor can vB owner listen on low port (<1024).

2) Primary Needs:
A) Run a web based email system with a full blown interface similar to Hotmail or GMail.
B) Allow users to have email addresses at your domain using their vB login name as the primary portion of the email: {username}@{domainname}
C) Allow users to check third party POP3/IMAP email addresses within the same interface
D) Allow users to access this mail account via POP3/IMAP daemon running on the ISP shared server on a high port (does not require root access).
E) The mail system should not require any registration. All registration information should be pulled from the vB user system and updated (including passwords) when a user updated in User CP. It is OK to add required fields to the vB system.

There was Hivemail that did a lot of this, but is long since dead. There has been mention that Jelsoft themselves would add this on, but that has not happened (may one day, but I have not seen it mentioned in a long time). SocketMail has all of these features and has promised repeatedly over the last two years to fully integrate with vB, but it has never happened. I also received an email today forwarded by a friend from their dev team that they have stopped development on the integration piece all together and are no longer making any attempt to integrate.

What else is out there - is in current development - works and is likely to be around for awhile matching vB upgrades? I would greatly appreciate any advise.

Thanks!

[Dismounted]

I don't think there's any email software out for vBulletin at this time, although I wouldn't think it'd be very hard to add a user to the email system on registration.

[El_Muerte]

A webmail client is usually a very complex piece of software.
But there are a few approaches, but most importantly...

You must have rfc2822 clean usernames, a lot of ascii characters are not allowed in the name part.

Then there are these approaches:

1. redirect the received emails
This would redirect the email to the email address the member has registered in the forum.
This can easily be done with a procmail script and a shell script to retrieve the destination email address. And of course you need a catch all email address.

2. redirect emails to the PM inbox
An email to a given address would end up as a private message. Just like with the previous approach this can be done with a catch all email address and a procmail script and shell script. Of course this adds the limitation of not being able to send emails from the inbox. But that could be "fixed".
However, this approach does require various security checks and content conversion of the emails.

3. use vBulletin as authentication service
With this you use vBulletin as the source for authentication, an existing webmail client (for example IMP) needs to be extended to look up the user credentials.
However, this will require a tricky email server setup, which is probably not possible unless you have root access.