sharing mailbox when the mail provider is our ISP with a POP account

  • Thread starter Thread starter O'Hara
  • Start date Start date
O

O'Hara

Hello,
I'm working in a small office with three computers (Win XP Home, with Office
2000).
Our mail server is at our ISP, we retrieve our mail through POP.
So far we used only one PC for our mail.
We would like to be able to send/receive mail with our other computers as
well.

With the above described installation, is it possible for Outlook to share
the mail box and address book?
Thank you!
 
Mailbox sharing is usually a bad thing since there's issues with item
deletion, etc. Any chance of you getting more than one?
 
We want all the people in our office being able to access this mailbox, not
to give a different mailbox to each user.
 
O'Hara said:
We want all the people in our office being able to access this
mailbox, not to give a different mailbox to each user.
Click to expand...

Then the only PROPER solution is to install a server and a Mail Server
application. How are your machines connected?
 
O'Hara said:
Hello,
I'm working in a small office with three computers (Win XP Home, with
Office
2000).
Our mail server is at our ISP, we retrieve our mail through POP.
So far we used only one PC for our mail.
We would like to be able to send/receive mail with our other computers as
well.

With the above described installation, is it possible for Outlook to share
the mail box and address book?
Thank you!
Click to expand...


Does your ISP provide IMAP accounts? With IMAP, the messages stay on the
mail server and you download a copy. When you or someone that logs in
deletes a message, it is only marked for deletion (a red line appears
through it) but it is not actually removed from the mail server until you
run a purge (or the expiration set in the account's definition). Using IMAP
would allow sharing a mailbox across several hosts or users without having
to copy around a .pst file. However, that only helps with mails and not
with other collaborative functions, like address book, calendaring,
journaling, meeting requests, etc.

If your ISP doesn't provide IMAP accounts, maybe you could run your own
local IMAP-capable mail server that yanks your mails using POP from your ISP
and then you connect your e-mail clients to your IMAP server.

Otherwise, and because I don't use nor am expert on collaborative software,
do a Google search on "groupware collaborative e-mail calendar address"
 
Vanguard said:
Does your ISP provide IMAP accounts? With IMAP, the messages stay on the
mail server and you download a copy. When you or someone that logs in
deletes a message, it is only marked for deletion (a red line appears
through it) but it is not actually removed from the mail server until you
run a purge (or the expiration set in the account's definition). Using
IMAP would allow sharing a mailbox across several hosts or users without
having
to copy around a .pst file. However, that only helps with mails and not
with other collaborative functions, like address book, calendaring,
journaling, meeting requests, etc.

If your ISP doesn't provide IMAP accounts, maybe you could run your own
local IMAP-capable mail server that yanks your mails using POP from your
ISP and then you connect your e-mail clients to your IMAP server.

Otherwise, and because I don't use nor am expert on collaborative
software, do a Google search on "groupware collaborative e-mail calendar
address"
Click to expand...

Thanks for all the information. The most important is the emails so I'll
look for a local imap server.
 
O'Hara said:
We want all the people in our office being able to access this
mailbox, not to give a different mailbox to each user.
Click to expand...

First, if you're using a single mailbox and it's on a POP server, then it
can be fed only by a single address or aliases of that address that all
point to the same mailbox, there's no way Outlook on any particular machine
can distinguish one person's mail from another's without rules on each
person's machine. Moreover, each Outlook will download all the messages in
that mailbox. If each Outlook isn't configured to leave copies of the
messages on the server, when one Outlook downloads the messages, they'll be
removed from the server and another person'sd Outlook won't have anything to
download. Additionally, someone will need to be tasked with cleaning out
the mailbox periodically because if everyone needs to leave the messages on
the server, the mailbox will fill up and become unusable. Op top of that,
since POP servers hand;e mail only, there's no possible way to share the
Contacts folder via that server. Finally, even if you do use rules and
leave messages on the server, everybody will see everyone else's messages.
No privacy of any kind.

For ways to share Contacts and Calendars, see
http://www.slipstick.com/outlook/share.htm
 
Back
Top