Hello, I'd like to be able to have Google groups functionality on my site. Meaning having the ability for people to email each other, with the emails posting to my site, in a threaded manner.
Though I'm ideally looking for something free, if there's software out there that accomplishes this for a price, I'm also interested in learning more about that.
Thanks guys for your time and comments.
You can try mailman software. http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/download.html
It is widely used by lot of linux user groups, free software users groups etc.
you should be looking at Groupware
http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=4&cat=Groupware
http://nexist.sourceforge.net/groupware.html
you can implement the google groups like functionality with one / more combination of these groupware softwares.
I'd consider some mailing list software which includes web archive.
mailman's got this - list archive in web format, in a threaded manner.
There are lots of free mailing list managers, but you might want to consider running your own NNTP server - leafnode is an obvious candidate which can maintain local groups and also replicate other NNTP groups. Note that this is just a NNTP server not a user-agent. But by using a standard protocol you are not forcing the user to only choose one front-end.
And of course, there are lots of web-based newsreaders available e.g. pnews, headliner and lots of tools for email integration and rss syndication.
C.
If a Java solution is OK for you (Java hosting is usually double the price of PHP hosting), than SubEthaMail might be exactly what you look for: http://code.google.com/p/subetha/
It is a mailing list manager, but it also has the Web UI to let the users use it instead of using the mail - just like google groups. Another advantage is that is using SubEthaSMTP as a mailing engine, and that's very efficient at handling huge amounts of mail because of it's asynchronous processing.
They are also "eating their own dog food", by using SubEthaMail itself to develop it (as opposed to e.g. Apache JAMES - this is just a mailing solution, no Web based UI).
See their user list here, or you can look at some screenshots to see that is quite advanced, and regarding usability I would say that it's even better than google groups.
Nabble has such a feature, you can register for a mailing list and a forum and combine them, it's really great.
AtMail is a new player in this game. They are paid software, but there whole idea is to take the pain of managing exim configuration files and manage it behind a convenient interface, backed by support.
There is a hosted version, that appears cheapest.
Teambox just released an open-source Google Groups alternative. It's public-accessible, and any user can view it without an account or post stuff inside.
It supports mailing lists, tasks and documentation pages. Take a look.