I need to create email accounts on my hosted domain programmatically from within a .NET app that I am writing. How can I do that?

At this time there is no way to do this in our shared environment.

This is a limitation of the SmarterMail web services, in that it only allows for one master login to be used when calling the SmarterMail web services. And of course for security reasons we cannot provide this information to customers, as it would allow someone to manage all the domains hosted on the mail server.

We are currently in the planning stages of an API to allow customer to interact with our systems in a programatic fasion and it is a possibility that SmarterMail features may be in the first release. I will add this to the list of features to be considered.

Thanks for the quick answer.

Unfortunately, not having this ability is a show-stopper for us. Short of waiting for the feature to show up, can you tell me what my opions are for getting this functionality at hostmysite.com? If I can't get it I'll have to find a different host which is really unforntunate because I really have had a great experience with hostmysite.com so far.

Waiting is likely not possible since our schedule is to have our site released in 4 weeks.

The only way to obtain this functionality is if yours was the only site on the server, which means that you'd need to purchase a dedicated server for the purpose of running the Smartermail Installation. This may be beyond your budgeting, however it's the only way we could make this work presently - especially given your time frame.

Though I've not researched this at all, I can tell you that that I *SERIOUSLY* doubt you'll find this sort of functionality at another webhost for the cost of a shared hosting account. The reasoning is very simple: shared hosts either create or purchase a control panel for their clients to easily manipulate their accounts in an easy to understand fashion. Few (if any) clients would want to have access to the 'backend' of the control panel, so it wouldn't be considered during the implementation phase. Since that sort of access isn't considered, no provisions are made for it, and it becomes impossible to do so at a later time for security reasons.

Dedicated hosting, where you control your own server, is different in that you have full access, and as such can basically do whatever you want - including writing an app that would use the webservices of Smartermail to create/delete/modify user accounts - without the security risk to other clients on the server, since there are no other clients on the server.

How about a virtually-dedicated host? Wouldn't that work? A dedicated server is beyond our budget during the early stages of the site's release.

I know in CPanel/WHM they provide you with an access hash that each reseller account can create accounts from outside/programmed interfaces. However I have never seen that done for individual e-mail accounts and am not sure if that's possible. I will look into it.

But, then we run into the problem that our VPS plans are based off of linux boxes, which of course do not support .NET.

I do not think it would be a problem to purchase a .NET Builder plan and a CPanel VPS plan, then run the script from outside of the box, but I'm not positive on that either.

Let me go look it up.

Just browsing the CPanel forums, it looks like someone was able to do so using php.
http://forums.cpanel.net/showthread.php?t=31121

Unfortunately their forums require activation.

Thank you! I'll get that post from the CPanel forum and will study it. Sounds like I'll need to take a crash course in PHP in order to port it to .NET!

I know I would LOVE to have this feature and it looks like SmarterMail has some webservices to allow user and alias maintenance, along with other things. I've not had the time to look into it though.

http://help1.smartertools.com/SmarterMail/Pro/v2/Topics/SystemAdmin/Misc/WebServices.aspx

For example:
User Administration
http://127.0.0.1:9998/Services/svcUserAdmin.asmx

There are twelve (12) functions of this service available for customization. These services allow developers and/or Administrators to dynamically create or delete users, return user statistics, return user attributes, update user information and more using SOAP, an HTTP GET command, or an HTTP POST command. The functions, and their corresponding properties, are:

AddUser - Creates a new user and adds them to the specified domain
GetUserStats - Returns statistics of the specified user for the specified time period
GetUser - Returns attributes of the specified user
UpdateUserAutoResponseInfo - Updates the specified user's auto response settings
UpdateUserForwardingInfo - Updates the specified user's forwarding settings
GetUsers - Returns attributes of each user in the specified domain
DeleteUser - Deletes the specified user from the specified domain
GetUserAutoResponseInfo - Returns the forwarding info of the specified user
GetUserForwardingInfo - Returns the forwarding info of the specified user
AuthenticateUser –Returns a response on whether the supplied user/domain/password is valid
LoginValidated - Returns a LoginResult object with the LoginValidated field set to True if the specified username matches the specified password

User Alias Administration
http://127.0.0.1:9998/Services/svcAliasAdmin.asmx

There are six (6) functions of this service available for customization. These services allow developers and/or System Administrators to dynamically create email aliases using SOAP, an HTTP GET command, or an HTTP POST command.. The functions, and their corresponding functions, are:

DeleteAlias - will delete a specified email alias.
UpdateAlias - will update a specified email alias.
GetAlias - will return information on a specified email alias.
AddAlias - will created an email alias and add it to the specified domain.
GetAliases - will return all aliases that belong to a specified domain.
SetCatchAll - Sets the specified alias to be the catch-all, or clears the catch-all if a blank alias name is provided.

UpdateUserForwardingInfo - Updates the specified user's forwarding settings
GetUsers - Returns attributes of each user in the specified domain
DeleteUser - Deletes the specified user from the specified domain
GetUserAutoResponseInfo - Returns the forwarding info of the specified user
GetUserForwardingInfo - Returns the forwarding info of the specified user
AuthenticateUser –Returns a response on whether the supplied user/domain/password is valid
LoginValidated - Returns a LoginResult object with the LoginValidated field set to True if the specified username matches the specified password