How Do I Start Creating My Own Email Service?

[SELFMADE]

Hello Physics Forums, CS department,

I want to create an email service similar to gmail.com or mail.yahoo.com. Where people can sign up for free. I have basic coding experience that includes getting an A on Intro to Java course at a university. Prior to that I have taught myself PHP.

Ruby on Rails seems to be the rage right now. Should I delve into that right away?

I don't even know where to start. Please help!

Thanks

 

[Evo]

Here's a very basic blurb on how to get set up, but they do suggest outsourcing a lot because there is a lot involved.

http://www.ehow.com/how_7270763_create-own-email-website.html

First get an idea of what features you want. Why do you want to do this. I used to help clients set up mail servers a LONG time ago there are many issues you can run into like problems with reverse dns, etc... that can be a pain if you have no experience.

How much is it going to cost you? You said you wanted to offer free e-mail, do you have a plan to recoup your costs? There are a lot of things you need to consider.

 

[JasonRoberts]

A new email would most likely need to have a better design. You should invest a lot of time into designing the thing, be fore coding it.

 

[jedishrfu]

I agree Jason's sentiments are spot on. You need to research existing email clients and see what cool features they have, you'll need them and what difficulties they present to the end user and you'll need to overcome them.

You have to design a compelling alternative or people won't move to your platform. You also need to establish clear rules on how email privacy is enforced, backed up, encrypted... And how you would deal with a govt request to read email of a party of interest.

There's several other platforms you could consider:
- grails ie groovy (super Java) script on rails (copies many of the features of Ruby on Rails)
- Php
- node.js write your code in javascript on both the client web page and the server.

 

[SELFMADE]

Thanks for the replies. I will start from those. I needed a starting point. Again, I appreciate the inputs.