Hi,

I was wondering if many people offer email only accounts? We own a couple domain registration service web sites and were thinking about offering "Email Only" accounts to our clients. We have a couple dedicated servers , both with WHM/cPanel that we use for our deign clients that have a TON of space available on both.

So I guess my questions are:

1) Do you think offering "Email Only" accounts is a good idea.

2) Can Webmail's template be modified to match our sites?

3) Can I take a peek at your site, if you offer "Email Only" accounts to see how you go about offering it?

Thanks,

Doug

I think that the problem with that is that most people that want an eMail only account will get that directly through their domain registrar.

It sounds like a good idea, but the profit margin might be so small that it won't be worth it - unless you count on the fact that they'll upgrade at some point.

Boris

Originally posted by MiraMesa.com
1) Do you think offering "Email Only" accounts is a good idea.

2) Can Webmail's template be modified to match our sites?

3) Can I take a peek at your site, if you offer "Email Only" accounts to see how you go about offering it?Probably not as said before alot of registrars have it as one of their services. Everything has the potential to be a money maker though. Just depends on how you market it.

Depends on what webmail client your using. I would imagine that all of the free webmail clients can be edited...Depending on your experience or how much your willing to spend :)

You could make a little bit of money out of it, but as hvoice and Haddy said, must domain registrars offer this service free.

Hi All,

Thanks for all the replies... much appreciated.

That was the main reason for my question... we own or are partners in a several domain registration companies, (ie. DotDealers.com (http://dotdealers.com), Dotway.com (http://dotway.com), and others... which all register quite a few domains per month... and was thinking of offering that service to them at a reasonable price.

As mentioned above, we already have a couple dedicated servers with WebHostManager and cPanel, so it seems like it might be easy to set-up. I am just not sure if the additional money is worth the headaches, or if there are a lot of headaches in just offering Email Only accounts?

Also if you can customize WebMail that they offer with cPanel?

Thanks again...

Doug

we get requests for email-only hosting on the user's domain every day, so it would appear that there is a market there. Network Solutions and Yahoo charge an arm and a leg for email hosting, so if you can get it together it shouldn't be hard to undercut them.

whether you could sustain an entire business on user-domain email hosting alone is doubtful though.
[okay, i see now it wouldn't be your only business, so scratch that.]

you would almost certainly want to write, or have written, your own email account management software though - rather than using something like cpanel - you want to have some very customizable ways of enforcing quotas, etc...

We offer email only accounts using Cpanel's Xmail skin with NeoMail and Horde. They don't bring in a ton of money but on the other hand they are pretty low maintenance accounts. We haven't really marketed them at all so there is probably some potential there.

As for modifiying or skinning the webmail I've never tried it but I'm sure it could be done. Don't know if it would be worth though.

i offer free web base email to about 70 people right now. It is a 20 mb free email system. I will be showing ads on the web pages, and will be offering pop3 account using this service for about $20/year.

I do have a cPanel server. But I have setup a squirrelmail installation independent of cPanel. This way I customize webmail for all my customers. I have few email only customers.

How are you going to offer email-only accounts via cpanel?

If I were to create a hosting plan via WHM, the account holder will also have access to ftp and be able to upload his webpage into his "email-only" account.

How can I go creating a email-only plan?

I'm considering to offer this service.

You just have to set them up with 0 ftp accounts and use a skin like Xmail that doesn't give them access to the file manager. Then they don't have a way to upload pages. We usually put an advertisement for our site as their index page. Works pretty well for us! :)

How do I change their index page?

But lets say I have a domain (adomain.com) that I want to give an email account (client@adomain.com) to my client.

How am I going to create it in my WHM? I also might want to sell other usernames to other clients (ie. client2@adomain.com, client3@adomain.com) but I got no idea how to go about doing it.

In the account creation page, what should I put under domain and how do I specify the email address the client can use?

It sounds like you are trying to do something a little different. We register a domain for the customer and then alow them to setup x amount of email accounts with x amount of disk space on that domain. This is fairly easy to setup in WHM.

Go to Add Packages.
Fill in all the info for the new package.
I use:
# of email accounts
Amount of space
Amount of bandwidth
Set everything else to zero or disabled.
Then select xmail for the default skin for that package.

That's it.
When you create an email only package save a blank index page in the account or like we do save an index page advertising our services.
Another option would be just to create a redirect to domain.com/webmail so when they go to there domain name they are redirected to the webmail login.

It sounds like what you are trying to do may be more suited for something like Hivemail though. Hivemail allows you to create email accounts on the same domain(or multiple domains) for different customers and the newest version supports PayPal subscriptions.

Hope that helps!:)

Zach

Thanks!

That was very informative.

I was wondering, do you have any experience with Hivemail? I was looking through their webpage and I couldn't find anything that says whether they could be integreted into Cpanel as a Webmail client (like Horde, Squirrelmail ...)

Could they be integreted into Cpanel?

With Hivemail all the mail gets delivered to a default cpanel account and then Hivemail retrieves it and sorts it to the user accounts so it's independent of cpanel and the accounts are setup in Hivemail. I have some experience with it. It has it's own control panel and registration system built in. I just finished making a skin for Hivemail on one of my sites but it's not in use yet. I haven't used it in production yet, I have about 150 users I'm going to switch over to it next month.

In regards to the topic starter -

Yes, there certainly is a market for it. There are quite a few webhosts who do this. There is even a market for retrieving e-mails from other addresses to put it all under one account: check out MailSnare and FuseMail for examples of that.

You are able to edit and change the skin of Horde. You are able to go to their website, and view various skins which have been made. I've never personally tried it, however it is possible.

You probably won't make a lot of money from having only a few e-mail only accounts, but if you had say a thousand or so - then you'd certainly be making a bit of profit. Of course, it all depends on the quantity of e-mail only accounts that you have.

In regards as to which program you should use, you would really need to have a made-from-scratch one. I used to be signed up with Lycos Mail Premium, and wouldn't have paid the amount of money that I did had it been simply Horde, NeoMail or SquirrelMail. If you wish to have clients actually paying you good money, then it is best to use your own unique program - HiveMail is good, however it certainly isn't unique; and I personally think the Lycos Mail Premium system is much better than the HiveMail system.

i'd rather consider offering a secondary mx service instead

Thanks everyone for all the great responses and detailed information! I really appreciate it. I have learned a lot.

Doug