How to Offer Free E-mail and Web Space from Your Site

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by Peter Cooper

In my recent article, Developing an Online Community, I covered the different aspects that make up a loyal community. I also covered community members in detail and how you can define them, and how forums and chat systems can work.

This time, however, rather than giving you the theory, we're going to look at the practical side of running free e-mail and Web space services within your community. We're going to start from the negative side of things (how your services could be abused, and how to protect them) and work towards the positive side of actually putting the systems in place.

The Legal Side

Before we look at how to install systems to provide free e-mail and Web space, you need to understand a little about the legal side. While most of us trust our users to use our services properly, there's a lot of people who would like to take advantage of them for their own illegal or immoral use.

Spamming. Spamming from, or pointing to, free e-mail accounts is popular. Some people also use free Web sites to spam search engines, although this isn't technically illegal. A simple way to curb spam on a free e-mail system is to make sure that it's either a) remotely hosted, or b) limited in the amount of recipients a user can specify in an e-mail.

Pornography and illegal materials. People like to distribute pornography and illegal materials (such as stolen software) because these things are a quick way to build a popular site. Sadly, you could get into trouble yourself if these end up on your server. Even if the content is legal, your ISP may take offense. However, you can't be expected to monitor everything that happens, especially if you have thousands of users. The simplest method is to inspect all sites that receive over a certain threshold of visitors per day. You could also do a search for files on the system with offensive words in the title.

So use a disclaimer! To provide yourself with a very light legal shield, you may want to display a disclaimer on your site. This usually manifests in the form of a 'Terms of Service' document that people have to approve when signing up for the free services. Most sites have them, so feel free to take theirs and adjust it for your own use (although, technically, that's not 100% legal either!).

So now we've covered the grim side of things, let's look at actually putting the systems into place.