# web based email **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 15, 2000, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-based-email/33281 "2000-09-15T05:08:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![chief](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/df788c/32.png) [@chief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chief)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2000, 5:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-based-email/33281/1 "2000-09-15T05:08:39Z")
can someone give me a technical explanation on how they program the interface and what kind of stuff they use on the back end to make web based email services like yahoo run? ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2000, 6:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/web-based-email/33281/2 "2000-09-15T06:09:03Z")
That’s an extremely complicated question. There are countless options. Some things that matter are: How you’re getting the mail to the server, i.e. SMTP, NFS from SMTP server, proprietary protocol, etc. How you’re CGI will access the mail: i.e. POP3, IMAP, direct-file access, SQL database, some-other-thing How you’re CGI will send new mail: i.e. direct-to-SMTP, spooled to mass-SMTP queue, etc How you’re generating your dynamic HTML, i.e. Perl, PHP, Java Servlets, ASP (yuck), or your own program. In short, every major web-based email thingie is probably rediculously different. There are a few free web-based mail packages available on [freshmeat](http://www.freshmeat.net/), mostly written in Perl and C and designed to connect directly to a POP3 server.