php - Is it legal to allow my users to read/access their emails from my site?

08
2014-07
  • user2018084

    I'm making a project for school where I will be using PHP to allow my users to log in to their email account using PHPMailer to receive/send emails.

    The purpose is that I will be providing an encryption service.

    But that means that they will have to send their password to my server, and my PHP script will be accessing their emails and sending/receiving them back to them after processing.

    It's a school project so I will be doing it anyway on a local XAMPP setup for the project. But I was wondering if I could make the service public.

    My question is, do I risk being sued by, ie Google, if I enabled Gmail users to use my service?

    After all it is legal to distribute an email client. The part that has me worried is that my server will be acting as a proxy and will at one point receive their password (although it will not be stored).

    (I know I could setup my own email server for this, but the idea would be to let users use their current email addresses)

    EDIT I plan on using HTTPS to avoid having plain text passwords flying around.

    • Answers
  • Michael Kohne

    No, there's no legal problem in being a user's mail client. The e-mail belongs to the USER, not to the hosting provider, and the user can access it with whatever compatible client they like.

    That said, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't even consider using a web-based encryption service that wasn't from my hosting provider. Using a third-party service to read my e-mail means that not only do I have to worry about my provider leaking my information, I have to worry about this other service leaking my information.

    I can't think of any way that anyone would appear trustworthy enough for me to double my exposure like that, when I can run an encrypting e-mail client on my desktop or my phone and at least have some control.


    • Related Question

    Settings to send an email from localhost for PHP code in Windows Vista
  • Kim Stacks

    I am using PHP 5 and Apache to do programming. My code can correctly send emails on the server, but on my own development machine I cannot send emails. There is clearly nothing wrong with my code, so I guess the problem is with my settings.

    I have turned off IIS so that I can assign port 80 to my Apache instance. I did not install PHP, Apache, MySQL using WAMP or XAMPP, but I installed each component individually.

    I have already tried assigning SMTP to localhost in php.ini and the port number, etc.

    I am running on Windows Vista. I am using a router at home, and I tend to assign a fixed IP address, 192.168.0.9 to my development machine.

    I used PHPMailer where I state a specific from address and to address and once again I insist that the code works on my live server.

    It is just not working on my development machine.


    • Related Answers
  • jmohr

    Vista does not come with an SMTP server like Windows XP did.

    I ran into a similar issue when I switched my development environment to Vista. So, you have to install an SMTP server.

    There are many to choose from, but I chose Free SMTP Server to handle development needs.

  • Tutul

    You can use xmail, it's very easy to configure and get running for the first time,yet you can deploy it for production use too.

  • djangofan

    I would prefer "Free SMTP Server" but , in cases where I want to view the traffic and the messages, then I would choose "Hamster SMTP Server" , which is also free.