Build Your Own PHP Web Mailer

In this tutorial you will learn how to create your own PHP Web mailer. You will learn the necessary steps for creating an email account and making connections to the server protocols for sending and receiving email. You also will get a listing of PHP commands that you can use to customize the Web mailer to your specifications. Assuming you have a basic knowledge of PHP, let's begin.

First, we need to create an actual email account, which we will do by opening a URL for creating mail accounts. Mail accounts of course can be created manually through Cpanel X. You just need to enter your own cpanel username, password, domain and skin, email domain and email quota.

<div class="code">$cpdomain='yourdomain.com'; // without https:// and www $cpskin=''; // x3 is newest, you'll see it when you log in to you cp $domain=''; // this is the email domain, usually the same as cpdomain, but it can be different if you have multiple domains $quota='20'; // amount of MB available for user's mails if(!empty($username) && !empty($password)) { $f = fopen ("https://$cpuser:$cppass@$cpdomain:2082/frontend/$cpskin/mail/doaddpop.html?email=$username&domain=$domain&password=$password"a=$quota", "r"); if(!$f) { die('Error: Cannot create email account'); } ?> </div>

Sending Email

Now that we have created the account, we need to make connections to the servers for sending and receiving mail. Let's begin with the server for sending mail, SMTP. You should stick with the mail() function if you're building webmail only for your domain addresses. Otherwise, your mail very likely will end up marked as spam.

So, we let users input their preferred mail settings, store them in a database, and use fsockopen to connect to the server:

<div class="code">$sh= fsockopen($server, $port, $errno, $errstr, $timeout); if(!$sh) { echo "Failed to connect to $server". $errno . " | " . $errstr; } fwrite($sh,"EHLO $server rn"); //have to say EHLO as initial command when requesting authentication fwrite($sh,"AUTH LOGIN rn"); //request authentication fwrite($sh, base64_encode($user_name)"rn"); //both user_name and pass have to be base64_encoded fwrite($sh, base64_encode($password)"rn"); fwrite($sh,"HELO $server rn"); //when logged in, say HELO fwrite($sh,"MAIL FROM: <$mail_from> rn"); // only email address goes here, do not enter your name fwrite($sh,"RCPT TO: <$to> rn"); //same here fwrite($sh,"DATArn"); // message and headers go after this fwrite($sh,"MIME-Version: 1.0 rn"); fwrite($sh,"Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 rn"); fwrite($sh,"To: $nameto <$to> rn"); fwrite($sh,"From: $namefrom <$from> rn"); fwrite($sh,". rn"); //a single dot represents the end of the message fwrite($sh,"QUITrn"); //close the connection</div>

You may use the server IP as well as the domain name. If you need an encrypted connection, add a tls:\ or ssl:\ prefix to server name. Don't forget that the default port number for these connections is different from the unencrypted one.

In order to track sent messages, we have to store them in a database. I suggest using one table with the following structure:

• userid
• accounted
• email_to
• name_to
• date_sent

If your users send a great number of messages per day, consider partitioning the table for better performance.

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