How to make your own mailing services like gmail or yahoo

I am a noob to php and databases. But I have an idea to perform mail operations on my own web server (i.e just by database operations), but I really don’t have any idea of how to send mail to external websites like gmail. and also I look forward to making my own email-addresses like ex:-myownemail@localhost. I have searched google multiple times but I couldn’t find any answer that I could understand. Can anyone tell me in simple words on how to do this?

Answer

First you need to have a webhost, grab a free one for testing purposes which supports mail function. Then after you are done setting up your host, try the following.

To send a mail, since you don’t care if it goes to spam, use this simple php code:

<?php
$to = "[e-mail]";
$subject = "This is subject";

$message = "<b>This is HTML message.</b>";
$message .= "<h1>This is headline.</h1>";

$header = "From:[e-mail] rn";
$header = "Cc:[e-mail] rn";
$header .= "MIME-Version: 1.0rn";
$header .= "Content-type: text/htmlrn";

$retval = mail ($to,$subject,$message,$header);

if( $retval == true )
{
    echo "Message sent successfully...";
}
else
{
    echo "Message could not be sent...";
}
?>

If you just want to read mails using PHP, PHP has native functions to talk to IMAP, NNTP and POP mailboxes.