there are a lot of areas i don't know anything about, so here's the deal:

i want to create something like a discussion group, but i have no ideea about mass emailing (or forwarding) with php, nor email handling.

i need to have an address to which everything is sent, php takes the message and puts it in the database and also mails it to all the members ...

the platform i'm using is freebsd.

now ... any tips (no full code please, just maybe short examples) on what stept i should take? what things i should be careful at? what would be the best way to send the emails to everyone? stuff like that.

any ideeas are welcome since the whole project is still in my head. i know the query is way to general but i hope some of you around here did something similar to this or to part of this before

thanks

Well, I've never even used a newsgroup so this is just guessing but it would seem to me, in order tackle this problem you would need to....

1.) create a custom header to pass along with each email describing which member this mail came from, which group it belongs to, etc.
2.) Use those headers to decide whether the member has sufficient priveleges to mail to the entire group, etc.
3.) Obviously you will need to either use an existing mail server and create a script running on a cron job to parse new mail or create your own mail server according to the RFC for SMTP/POP3/MIME.

It may be a good idea to encrypt your custom header as well (true encryption, not hashing) so it will be harder to spoof.

Originally Posted by cptnwinky

2.) Use those headers to decide whether the member has sufficient priveleges to mail to the entire group, etc.

all members may post ... this is part of a bigger project i wanna do in my spare time. a private area for the student organisation i am part of.

the header part is noted

Originally Posted by cptnwinky

3.) Obviously you will need to either use an existing mail server and create a script running on a cron job to parse new mail or create your own mail server according to the RFC for SMTP/POP3/MIME.

we are using SquirrelMail.

btw ... i remember a conversation about mass-emailing. how can that be achieved with php? for the webbased part of the newsgroup. ok so a member posts from the web interface, i store it ... that is covered ... now how would i go around to email the message?

For your reference SquirrelMail, although awesome, is not a mail server rather a client. If your on a freebsd server here is a link to how to set up a mail server http://www.screamingelectron.org/for...read.php?t=725

As far as mass emailing with php you would want to read over the RFC for SMTP http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc821.html and wrap a few messages (like a hundred or something) in an envelope, open up a socket connection to your SMTP server and send the messages this way. Using php's sendmail for 1000 plus emails will more than likely bring the server to it's knees.