SocketMail.com offers professional webmail solutions for purchase.
Title
SocketMail :: PHP Webmail and beyond
Description
Powerful, flexible and feature rich webmail engine using PHP and MySQL. Supports multi-domain hosting/aliasing. Offer email service like hotmail or gmail to your site visitors. Make money by offering premium service to users. Support PayPal/Ibill/NOCHEX. Support integration with Exim/Qmail/Sendmail/Posftix
Languages
English
Contact
- Creative Digital Resources Sdn Bhd
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Additional Information
Community Reviews
- Original review for SocketMail.com from User:71.126.98.223
- Suggested constructive review for SocketMail.com
- Would be good if this software provided better security against the spammers.
- Customer support for those who have bought this software needs to be improved. Email support system should also be made more reliable.
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do NOT buy this software, it comes with huge bugs and security will be compromised for your servers. also, your install will be hacked.
the people who wrote this software are never available for any support. their emails are bounced and have been bounced since last July 07, when I paid them $40 dollars for support I never received.
you'll be wasting your time and money!!!
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Several reviews about SocketMail Lite complain about buggy software with virtually no support. I almost always defer to reviews when making a significant purchase. After all, I don't wait to stain my reputation with visitors by offering poor service and I don't want to lose $120. However, I took the negative reviews with a grain of salt as they appear mainly around 2003, six years ago.
I crossed my fingers, hoping the company had changed, and took the leap. After all, the only alternatives I discovered were 1) Atmail - although nice software, way out of my price range with a per-user charge (up to the thousands) slapped on top of licensing fees, plus extra charges if you wanted any good features; 2) Alstrasoft, a company with nothing good written about it anywhere, with negative reviews plentiful not just in its infant stages but from this month; and 3) Hivemail, an abandoned project seemingly revived by rogue programmers working in erratic spurts, with no checkout system (not too inspiring in terms of support) plus more costly than Alstrasoft and SocketMail.
To say the least, I do not regret taking the jump. To start with, I have nothing but good things to say about SocketMail Lite support thus far. My support and feature requests have received responses in less than 24 hours in every case. So far, Mr. Shavim Parikh, the owner, has responded himself to all of my inquiries. He helped me to resolve installation issues I had with the software. SocketMail also now offers Priority Support with a $250 tag, so I can only assume Priority Members would receive even better attention. However, even without this, I can't complain about support.
Installation consists of uploading all necessary files to your sites, changing permissions on quite a few files to 777, creating a MySql database, then running the installation script. After you enter in your database name, user, and password, the script takes care of the rest, setting up necessary tables for you. To finish off installation, you basically create the admin account, create storage quotas for email accounts, and add your POP3 catchall account. The SocketMail Lite Manual explains this well. To sum up, pretty much anybody with the skills to register a website can install the script.
The admin interface gives you good control over running your website in a simple, easy to understand format. You can add an unlimited number of domains with the press of a button and arrange their priority on the login/registration dropdown as desired.
You can also serve advertisements, including banners and forced signatures, with different rates packages. I don't yet know if you can create a purchase page for potential advertisers which would automatically accept payment and set up advertisements.
You can create email packages with varying levels of price, advertisements, storage, and more. These packages are added to the registration page for selection and automatically process payment (PayPal accepted) and account creation.
Of course, you can view all active accounts, purge unused accounts, and so on.
I didn't see an option for SSL but I might have missed this. A quick three lines in your .htaccess file solves this beautifully, anyway.
The default Aqua theme user interface is sleek and beautiful. If you can figure out minimal PHP, you can also customize this (or any) theme to meet your needs. The admin interface also has a theme and file editor, but I haven't bothered with it. I simply changed the background and the logo image in the CSS file and now the site truly looks like my own. To further make the site look like my own, I plan to purchase the license to remove the "Copyright SocketMail" notice at the bottom of each page. This license runs $100.
I haven't discovered any bugs obvious in the user interface as of yet, and I've given it a thorough thrice-over. According to the logs on the website, it appears that they update frequently to correct bugs, security threats, or just add new features. Since you shoulder a $30 update subscription fee when you purchase the software for $90, you're good with updates for a year. After that, prepare for a $50 yearly update subscription fee.
I did have one concern regarding security. To retrieve a lost password, the user answers a security question he/she created at sign-up. Upon correctly answering the question, a new computer-generated replacement password appears. Since a spam-bot could attack the servers with answer guesses until it finally found a correct one, I'd like to see a captcha or other preventative security measure on the form. I relayed my concerns to Mr. Parikh, who said he would add it in version 3.3 or so.
Since the programmers are Indian and therefore presumably not native speakers of English, the text on the user interface, while perfectly understandable and free of spelling errors, is occasionally awkward for the discerning English speaker. Of course, I suspect most native speakers would fail to notice these little bumps and, again, if you can figure out minimal PHP, you can easily change the text as you see fit.
Another great thing about Lite is that it works on a shared server.
All in all, I would recommend this software with any reservations. You can see my running installation at: http://www.faemail.net
Related Domains
External Links
- Alexa: SocketMail.com
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