My freinds and I want to build an email system

Hi there team,

My freinds and I want to build an email system using delphi. It would be something similar to Microsoft Office.
We are trying to get some info on how to do this effectivly. We have spoken to someone who also is building one at the moment but he is having some difficulty.
He said that while he can send and receive email via some email servers, he is having difficulty in sending and receiving emails from some major servers like yahoo and hotmail. He is trying to use the IMAP protocol to do it.
FOr our email system we definatly want to be able to send emails to people with yahoo or hotmail accounts!
It seems that building your own email system is quite difficult.

Has anyone who has done this before got any ideas so that we can get started. Is using the IMAP protocol the way to do this or should we try another way?

Why is it so difficult to send and receive to yahoo and hotmail?

Where is the best place to start so that we can develop or program along the correct track?

Any help appreciatted
Kind Regards
Myles

>> FOr our email system we definatly want to be able to send emails to people with yahoo or hotmail accounts!
For sending emails (and not just to hotmail or yahoo) you can use a stock SMTP component that comes with delphi. That's how mails are sent.

>> Is using the IMAP protocol the way to do this or should we try another way?
POP3 is a common protocol that is used to download email from your account. IMAP is another such protocol. Hotmail doesn't allow POP3 access (they used to) and IMAP access is allowed only if the account holder has the MSN Paid service or whatever they call it. Bear in mind that not everyone uses POP3 and not everyone uses IMAP, so you may need to support both.

Delphi comes with some very nice SMTP and POP3 components by default. You can also get some nice mail components from ICS http://www.overbyte.be/ along with some demo programs for SMTP and POP3. For IMAP or MAPI components (and more POP components), look at:
http://www.torry.net/pages.php?id=211

I would also strongly advice you to start reading up on POP, SMTP, IMAP and MAPI since you seem to have a poor idea of what these protocols actually do.