I was thinking about the possibility of making an e-mail service that was a lot like Gmail or Hotmail or such.
It would be your usual e-mail service, except you'd get a nice AJAXy interface like Google and you'd get a decent amount of storage.
The only difference is, instead of using the website name of the service, (like hotmail.com, gmail.com, yahoo.com, etc), anyone who owned a website could allow others to use their domains....so for example, mark could submit his domain and then those who got an invite could use a getvanilla.com address, or I could submit my website, and those who got an invite could use a richeswillrust.com address.
Is this even possible? I'm trying to figure out why it hasn't already been done...it seems to be a pretty decent idea.
Actually, that would be an option, but I think it would also be smart to have it hosted so that those without a server could use it. You know, you could just register a domain and use it without worrying about getting a server.
But I was mainly wondering if it is even possible to do this. I mean, if I have my own domain hosted on another server, can I actually be sending and receiving e-mail through that domain on another totally seperate server?
gmail already offers 2.6+ gigs of storage and you can use your own domain with it. and as far as a good interface for an imap server, try http://www.roundcube.net/
I must admit i never knew that. I was gonna say that it wouldnt be easy since your domain has mx records to point to a particular server - in which case it wouldnt be possible for someone to submit their domain for general use *and* use it for their own email on their own server at the same time. If *they* were also gonna use your service then yeah that'd work just as easily as any other online email service.
I just installed that redcube thing on my server and i must say its rather tasty. I cant wait for some further development (and hopefully some personalised css coming my way)
I wouldn't allow anybody except friends or relatives (or employees, students, etc) to use a domain name I "own" for legal problems and the very bad reputation that could be associated to my site if they began to go wild (spam, rude speaking and so on)