network share email storage

[Steve Mowbray]

Hi

I am trying to find a way of keeping archived emails for a group of users on
the group file server such that they can access these emails via
outlook/outlook-express/live-mail for reading and occasional archive of
personal email.

Firstly - cant find a way of opening a network share email store file from
any of the three email clients

Secondly - I dont think there is a common email store file format so it
would enforce the same client across all users

Any ideas - Im trying to avoid adding a server into the requirement.

Thanks
Steve

 

[Michael Santovec]

One option might be an IMAP server. You could set up accounts in the
various mail programs to access the shared server. For some samples of
IMAP servers that you could run on your network, see:
Mercury Mail Transport System
http://www.pmail.com/overviews/ovw_mercury.htm
Hamster "Classic"
http://www.arcorhome.de/newshamster/tgl/misc/hamster_en.html

If you were using just Outlook Express (OE), Vista Windows Mail (WM) or
Windows Live Mail (WLM), you could use EML files (one per message). All
those program support that file format. You just double click the EML
file to open in one of those programs.

As for the Office Outlook users, if they just need to view the saved
messages, they wouldn't be able to use Outlook, but they they would
still have either OE or WM already installed on their PC and could still
double click EML files.

 

[...winston]

Are you willing to copy the email files from a given email client to a separate folder(ie. OE, WM, WLM will be written as an *.eml
file, Outlook will be written as *.msg). thus a given client is necessary to open either file type.