The WebMail Service
Although mail clients, such as outlook, provide quick and powerful management of your mail, they do lack certain flexibility required by people on the move. Mail clients are flawed by having to be installed on every machine you wish to access your mail from. This means that accessing your mail from multiple computers costs money and can be complicated. WebMail solves all these problems and remains just as useful as a mail client. It provides access to your mail through any standard web browser and from anywhere in the world, ensuring that any computer is capable of accessing your mail. The service also has built in support for all available account options, including address books, multiple folders, filters, auto-responses and much more. If you run a large company then WebMail has even more benefits as not having to pay for lots of expensive mail clients could potentially save thousands.
Enabling the WebMail Service
Enabling WebMail is easy and can be done by enabling a single tick box. For more information on managing the listening port, please view the Tutorial: Using the Listening Services page.
How WebMail Works
The WebMail service is basically an integrated web server which has its own built in script system. The pages displayed by the WebMail service are simply HTML files and normal GIF graphics. These HTML files are generated from template HTML files which contain tags to indicate where certain information should be inserted (e.g. ####USERACCOUNT#### gets replaced with the User/Login). When a user accesses a particular page, the template file is loaded, processed and then sent to the user.
Ability Mail Server comes installed with a free template called ‘Original’. This template is additionally intended to form the base of any customization you may wish to create.
Editing the Templates
You can find detailed information on how this is done by going to the Tutorial: Editing WebMail Templates page.
Running Your Own 'Sign-up' Email Service
Online email services which provide WebMail are currently very popular, as they can provide 'no-ties' email access from anywhere. This provides a great platform for advertisements, marketing, research and potential profit making. Ability Mail Server has a feature called 'Automatic Sign-ups' which allows you to run such a service. The following sections offer advice on certain aspects of an email service that are possible with Ability Mail Server.
Selling Advertising Space
The WebMail template used by the service is made from simple HTML files, which can be edited using any standard HTML editor (e.g. FrontPage, Dreamweaver, Notepad...etc.). By editing the templates you can not only personalize the look, but you could also add advertisements. This opens up the possibility of selling advertising space. Additionally, you could also sell upgrade accounts to your users which would remove the advertisements or give higher account limits (read the next section to see how).
Selling Upgrades
Because you can assign new sign-ups to a particular group, you can place them in a restricted 'free' group. This group could have a small mail size and account allocation limit and could even prevent access to POP3 and IMAP4. You can then allow your users to buy upgrades which would entitle them to larger allocation limits and even additional access to services such as POP3 and IMAP4, which would be possible by simply moving them into a different group.
If you wanted to advertise on the 'free' accounts pages and not on the paid accounts, you could add new tags into the template which take advantage of the IF tag command. This would allow you to activate adverts when the user is accessing from a particular group.
Collecting More Information During Sign-ups
By default, the sign-up page only collects information such as the user’s name, address, telephone number and password resetting options. By editing the _signup.html template page you could add any extra fields you require. When a user completes a sign-up, you can enable an email to be sent to the administrator. This email will contain the entire contents of the sign-up form (including any additional fields you add) which allows you to archive the information in any way you want. Also, this additional information is stored in the accounts ‘Additional Sign-Up Fields’ list, which can be accessed at any time through the normal dialog interface or through Remote Admin.
Running WebMail and a Web Server Together
By default, WebMail runs on port 8000 and so should not interfere with a web server. However, the problem with this is that you must place the port value after your domain when accessing the facility (e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com:8000). The sections below describe the different ways that you may wish to get around the problem.
Integrated Login Form
If you have an understanding of HTML forms then this method may work best for you. The _index.html template page contains a simple HTML POST form which contains only 2 or 3 fields. These are 'user', 'pass' and the optional 'extra' field. This form could be placed directly onto your normal website and then by adjusting the POST action field of the form to something like http://www.yourdomain.com:8000/_login, the form will log users into WebMail and at the same time move them onto the other port. Please note that the security code image cannot be used in this mode.
Multiple IPs
If your server computer has multiple IPs assigned then WebMail could be integrated into your site seamlessly. By ensuring your web server listens only on a certain IP, WebMail could be set to listen on another IP. This would then allow you to run WebMail on port 80 and so permit normal access using http://www.yourwebmaildomain.com.
Redirection
If you have access to a service which performs redirections then you could set up a domain or sub-domain which performs a redirection to the WebMail facility. This would allow your users to access your site through something like http://webmail.yourdomain.com which would then automatically take them to http://www.yourdomain.com:8000. |
