I need a way for my customers to login to a message center from my website and access their information and receive/send messages. I have found a few services out there offering this, but are either very expensive or too limited in what they provide. Any suggestions?

Thanks

How about a private forum? Threaded messages and private messages.

Thanks, Tom. I will look into that.

I work with a couple of education businesses that have a service similar to what I am looking for. Customers open the website and login to access their own account. When the customer's page comes up, they immediately see their email. They can send and receive messages there. Also, a list of tasks and assigments are available.

I have looked into this in elearning and online education services. These companies offer a lot of great options that I do not need.

Oh, I see. I don't know of anything that can accomplish all that. Can you share what accomplishes that sort of thing? You have sparked my interest, not that I'll have a need for such a system.

Tom,

There is a free education service that is provided by Blackboard. You cannot charge anything to anyone who uses the system through you. It is designed for teachers to provide coursework for students to access online. It is a message (email) system as well as an assignment and assessment service. It is really nice, and you can set up accounts for each of your students to login to his or her own coursework for each of the classes you create in the Blackboard system.

You can set up five classes for free. It is an awesome tool for teachers and education professionals to use to allow students to access coursework online. However, if you wish to have more than five courses, or if you want to charge a tuition or fee to students accessing your courses, the pricetag starts at $9500. Of course, if you are an institution or large education provider, it is well worth it. It is way more than what I need for my work, so I need to keep shopping around.

Here is the website if you would like to take a look:

www.coursesites.com

I think you can have something like that in gmail.

OK, I have seen Blackboard on some school sites. I never have used it, though. And I can certainly understand that $9500 is a bit steep. Ouch.

Did you have a look at Moodle? It is opensource.

Blackboard is a bit of a nemesis for me, but to truly experience hell, try "The Learning Manager"

Blackboard is rather outdated, my school uses it only because they're on contract. It is regularly down for maintenance, shows errors, and is difficult to use.