What do I need to send and receive e-mails?

To send and receive e-mail messages in your application, you need MailBee Objects or MailBee.NET Objects which are interfaces (API) between your application and a mail server, allowing sending, receiving and parsing/constructing e-mail messages.

Although MailBee.NET Objects allows sending emails without a relay SMTP server (directly to recipients' SMTP servers), usually, sending is performed through a relay SMTP server which receives messages from you and relays them to the recipients. Thus, you obviously need an SMTP server to send and receive emails or you can send messages without an SMTP server, but in such case application powered by MailBee.NET Objects should be installed on a workstation/server which has MX record assigned, otherwise most of recipients' SMTP servers will reject your messages for security reasons. You may set up your own mail server, use ISP's one or any mail server available in Internet.

Most mail servers support SMTP, POP3 and IMAP protocols. SMTP protocol is meant for sending mails, POP3 and IMAP - for receiving mails stored in a mailbox. MailBee Objects and MailBee.NET Objects fully support these protocols and you can use them for communicating with any mail server. If you want to provide your users with access to their e-mail through a web browser, you can make use of AfterLogic WebMail Lite or AfterLogic WebMail Pro which are user friendly web interfaces to users' mailboxes.