Email Programs

Ok, I'm new to Web Programming, Programming in general, so I'm not sure if this belongs in this category or not. However, I'm designing a site right now, and would like to have our own email system, for site members. Does anyone know what type of programming languages might be used to design this and what other type of facilities and capabilities will be necessary to implement this? Any advice on this topic would be helpful.

Thanks
Jodi

I'm actually in the process of doing this myself, and so far I have found that ASP can do just about everything as far as storing the information, password protecting it, Deleting it, and making easy-to-use navigation systems with. As for actually sending and recieving the mail that's a different story, I haven't quite figured that part out just yet.

Really, That's interesting to know. I been poking around a couple of other websites and found that PHP seems to hold possiblities.

Ok, stupid question of the day? Is PHP the Pearl scripting language?

There are many languages that can do this sort of thing: Perl, ASP and PHP are the most commonly used on the net (let's assume asp.NET is the same as ASP for simplicity, shall we? lol).

Perl is the oldest language of the three and is very similiar to C in it's style... It's powerful, but also the hardest to learn from scratch and can be a bit too powerful. It doesn't have any web-specific functions that really help you out, so it isn't as optimised as ASP and PHP are.

ASP is Microsoft's offering to the web. It will only run on windows servers (with any efficiency and dependability) and as it was specifically written for the web over a period of time, it contains useful functions and uses the same coding style as VB, so if you've used VB, it's very easy to get along with.

PHP is from the open source community (think Linux), but I'm glad to say it's nowhere near as unwieldy as Linux can be. PHP was also written specifically for the web and because anyone can submit code for it (because it's open source) it is almost completly bug free, very secure and contains a huge array of extremely relevant functions - Microsoft can't really compete with tens of thousands of developers adding to a language like that. PHP is similiar to C-Style languages.

If you want an e-mail system, your first thought should be to which language you want to use. If you already have webspace, it might support ASP or PHP (one or the other, not both) and so you could decide based on that. If you're not sure which language to lean for, then base it on your knowledge of VB, or what other sorts of languages you want to learn.

I should also point out that there are many readily available (and free) e-mail system scripts available out there for ASP and PHP and you can easily setup those, which would save you learning all this and designing your own.... unless you really want to!

Well I think the point of it is to do it yourself though. I can use scripts all day long and have the most powerful website, but when people want me to do the same for them then I don't know what I am doing. Haha, I might find a script or two and use them as guidelines, but I hardly ever use someone else's things. It just bother's me.

Thanks Skirent, I do want to learn these languages, as many of them as I can. Although, I have discovered those handy little scripts from other people, they go along way in shortening the learning curve as well as making something that's easy to plug into a web page easily, until I can start writing my own. My goal however is to write my own.

I found free scripts to be the easiest way to shorten my learning curve (or is that steepen my learning curve?). I guess this is mainly because I am teaching myself. I usually just find a script that does basically want I want to do, have a look at it and then give it a go myself.