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open source email/message system

Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 11:41 am
by spedula
Basically I need an open source email client to run in my app, but there's a catch. I don't want it to be like regular gmail type client.

The app I'm working on provides my users with a website. They will have a contact form there. When that's filled out it gets sent to their in-app mail box and their registered email account. However, they cannot see the email address of the person who sent the email, it would just be a uniqueID@myDomain.com. They would then reply to that message, gets sent to my server, logged in their in-app message log and sent to the original senders email inbox with uniqueID@myDomain.com as the senders address. eBay does something very similar to this.

My question is, does something like this already exist. Perhaps open source or for purchase?

If not, I have the specs already written out and will be posting the job on oDesk.com within a few days if anyone is interested.

Re: open source email/message system

Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 11:52 am
by Jonah Bron
So you want to hide the original emailer's email, and then forward the reply from the uniqueID email to their actual email?

Re: open source email/message system

Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 12:32 pm
by spedula
Yes. Something like that.

Re: open source email/message system

Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 3:13 pm
by Jonah Bron
I don't think PHP alone can create dummy email accounts. You'll need to manipulate your email server somehow. That I don't know how to do. Maybe there's some sort of mod_rewrite for email servers?

Re: open source email/message system

Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 3:20 pm
by John Cartwright
Jonah Bron wrote:I don't think PHP alone can create dummy email accounts. You'll need to manipulate your email server somehow. That I don't know how to do. Maybe there's some sort of mod_rewrite for email servers?
The best bet would be to simply have a "catch" all email address, which all emails are forwarded to. From there, you could simply use imap_* to read the contents of the mail, and perform the neccesary logic.

Re: open source email/message system

Posted: Wed Feb 02, 2011 3:52 pm
by spedula
Jonah Bron wrote:I don't think PHP alone can create dummy email accounts. You'll need to manipulate your email server somehow. That I don't know how to do. Maybe there's some sort of mod_rewrite for email servers?
Actually. It doesn't need to "create" the email accounts. You can setup cPanel to pipe any incoming email's that fits a specific format or contains a string to a PHP script.

Also, it's possible to connect to cPanel via PHP through socket 2082 and do multiple functions, like creating subdomains, addon domains, etc... So I'm sure there is a way to create email accounts as well.

Getting off topic though, I know how it's supposed to be programmed. I just don't have the time to do it myself while building the UI and a while slew of other things. I'm asking if there is some for-sale script/app that already does something like this.