OT (maybe): Shareable Mail

[Chris Gonnerman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cameron Laird" <claird at starbase.neosoft.com>


> In article <a2rpgf$13809r$1 at ID-11957.news.dfncis.de>,
> Emile van Sebille <emile at fenx.com> wrote:
> >
> >I have a (single) customer doing exactly this using Netscape
> >Communicator and an imap account at their ISP.  When you 
> >consider that the owners also check the mail from the road 
> >and from home, that comes close to two customers sharing a 
> >single email address.  I'm not sure what you mean though by 
> >"including local mailboxes".

Emile:  I hadn't thought of IMAP...

> So is the advice to install an IMAP server?
> 
> Chris, could you go over that description again?  What's
> the current ("LAN-connected") e-mail system?  If it's
> Microsoft Exchange, is it not enough simply to have the
> end-users set a preference to Not-Delete, so that they
> both see items?

OK, here we go.  Of my two customers, one has a 10-15 seat
LAN running Win98, including the server(s).  The other has 
one computer, and is preparing to expand to two.  His
business is 25% email based and is expanding rapidly.

I might talk the first into an Exchange server with Outlook,
but the second just wants to run Outlook Express on both 
computers at the same time with the same boxes (Inbox, Outbox,
etc.) visible at the same time.   Outlook Express doesn't
DO this for normal mailboxes though.

He might accept a different email client or even a webmail
system but the concurrent access is critical to his 
acceptance.  Exchange is obviously thousands of dollars of 
overkill at his current size; at the rate his business is
expanding it might be feasible later...

> I wrote little e-mail clients all the time.  I'm sure I
> can give you one within the price range you mention.  I
> think we need to understand the expectations better, 
> though, before we can give good help.

The price range I quoted was intended to blunt the mentions
of Exchange.  I have a very broad range of customer sizes in
my business, from home customers to small corporate sites,
and most of them are very uninterested in the pain and 
expense of Exchange (or GroupWare or Notes for that matter).