E-mails and outlook

[Anders]

Hello. I have a catch anything e-mail address. The computers are networked and share an internet connection. I want one computer to only download e-mails from one address, e.g. myname@myserver.blah.uk, and the other to only download e-mails from a different address, e.g. myfriend@myserver.blah.uk. Is this possible? The computers are using Outlook 2002. The people in question cannot be persuaded to use Thurderbird unfortunately.

Thanks in advance for any help.

P.S. Hope this is ok in this forum, was not 100 percent sure which to choose.

[Grey M@a]

um if they are not using profiles or exchange then what ever address you put into each client will pick up that mail and only that mail

[Anders]

Well that is what I hoped would happen. But all clients pick up everything sent to @myserver.blah.uk. I have specified the e-mail address in the account settings, but that just seems to affect the reply to address.

[Jonny M]

Then something's screwy with your mail server

[Anders]

Well I thought about it a bit more. You can only log into the mail box using one username and password. I spoke to the customer support people and they said I need some software at my end to do what I want.

Now I would be happy for Outlook to simply say: is each e-mail addressed to x@etc, if yes then download and delete from mailbox; if no then leave it in the mail box. However I do not think it can do that. So I guess I need a program to act as a mail server for me on one of the computers? Anyone know of any freeware programs that can do what I am after?

[Nemeliza]

I spoke to the customer support people and they said I need some software at my end to do what I want.

Im not so sure of this

You need to setup the email accounts as INDIVIDUALS with their own quota in your control panel (if you have access to this, do you own your domain..if so how is it hosted). This will mean that mailbox1.yourname.com will recieve ONLY mail sent to that address and mailbox2.yourname.com will recieve ONLY mail sent to that address.

This is exactly what i have done with 4 of my domain names, You will find that each email address will have a different username and you can set them individual passwords. I then set all mail which isnt routed to a specific address to be bounced back to the sender (helps with spam and so on).

I use Outlook Express and have used Outlook also with this and have had no problems.

[wberg]

I think you can have many e-mailadresses in the same outlook.

Otherwise, try Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6.

[Paul Adams]

If it's a catch-all email address for the domain, as in the original post, then it is a single mailbox that anything addressed to the domain ends up in - the fact that it's a single username/password combination to access the account backs this up.

To my knowledge there's no easy way of downloading specific emails based on their recipient address (might be wrong, not too hot on ESMTP commands) - so you probably are looking at some client-side software to download all the mail and create "virtual mailboxes" locally.

This assumes the clients are at the same site - once the mail is downloaded it is either flagged as read or deleted from the mailbox, so if your second client is not on your LAN then this solution isn't much good.

I'll have a poke around and see if I can spot any freeware POP3 server software - though to be quite honest I'd recommend just paying the tenner a year for a completely separate mail account and use email forwarding, it's a lot easier and doesn't rely on any clients being powered on or having special software running...

[Anders]

Yes I basically need a piece of software to filter the e-mails based on the addresses they are sent to. There are only two computers, so the software can sit on the computer that has the direct internet connection. Then Outlook can connect to this piece of software. Does anyone know of a piece of freeware that will do this?

[Paul Adams]

Don't know of any freeware ones I'm afraid, but I've used a version of VPOP3 some years ago in a small company and that worked fine.

We had a Windows NT 4.0 Workstation box connecting to Demon Internet using dial-on-demand, and WinGate sharing the connection for the LAN users - VPOP3 sat on this box, pulled all the mail in from the one account and split the mail between its own mailboxes.
v2.0 is now out, and it's £30 for the home version (up to 5 users) - I think there's a trial version.
http://www.pscs.co.uk/products/vpop3/index.php

Another I found is FTGate - http://www.accsys.uk.com/ftgate.htm
Can't vouch for this one at all, don't see an option for a trial version, but it's £25.

Both authors are in the UK.

[Moonshade]

I think you can have a few in the same outlook, I've had 2..otherwise do as wberg said..download thunderbird 0.6

[Paul Adams]

I think you can have a few in the same outlook, I've had 2..otherwise do as wberg said..download thunderbird 0.6

You can have multiple accounts in Outlook (I have 4 set up at home), but if you want to view emails for specific addresses received by those accounts you would need to use the Rules Wizard to move/delete the emails you don't want, but I think you still have to actually d/l them.

If 2 separate users were using the same account with different addresses, they'd need to both have the option to "leave a copy of messages on the server" checked, or it would delete all of them after collection - including any unread ones for the other user.

[Anders]

Well I found a few pieces of freeware that might do what I wanted but I never got round to properly working out how to use them.

Would you recommend any companies in particular for registering a domain name and for using that domain name for e-mails? I don’t really need a website at the moment but maybe I will in the future. Been looking around, http://www.registron.co.uk/ seem ok. I want to be able to setup different e-mail address at the domain though, rather than have a catch all account. To achieve this I would have to have hosting as well from registron, I think.

[scottyman]

I use web-mania.com and that's pretty cheap - found it's relatively good value, in comparison to others when running single domain names - plus 500mb of storage for the website (I know it's not what you're asking for - but it comes in handy for storing photo galleries) plus their pop3 package is pretty good. If you can get a provider hosting IMAP4 and LDAP for your contacts lists, that's pretty handy also - means you've got everything sitting safely on a server somewhere, and little danger of losing e-mails on those traditional spring cleans. Web-mania doesn't support IMAP4, but with 30mb storage on pop3, it's still pretty good. Their web-mail is pretty nice also - but sometimes a bit flaky.

In essence, a catch-all address is a complete waste of time, unless you're the only person using it - I don't think wanadoo have addressed this yet either. It's a cheap, nasty and offensive way of promising individual e-mails but not delivering. harrumph.
Other alternative is to install an old machine with linux and postfix - use that as your mta, and have spam assassin filtering away merrily in the background, and use that to deliver mail internally (or even externally if need be) then you can set up your own domain name, get an account with free-ip or dyndns to handle inbound mail- then take over the world!

I think we may have to write a how-to on these kind of things too... will do it later today or tomorrow.

[Anders]

I would certainly be interested in reading that how-to. Am I right in thinking that MTA stands for Mail Transfer Agent? In terms of the original problem I have, I guess it is a freeware MTA that I need.

I want to setup a domain with e-mail addresses for myself so I would actually be the only one using it. I want a nicer e-mail address and I am fed up of the spam I am receiving. Even with Thunderbirds Junk Mail filters I am still getting over whelmed on my Orange e-mail account. Hotmail is not so bad, but to be honest I just cannot be bothered with it anymore.

Web-mania’s hosting package looks good. Although Web-mania are twice the price of registron.co.uk when it comes to registering a domain name. Am I right in thinking I can use registron.co.uk to register my domain name, and get my hosting from somewhere else, such as Web-mania? Can I have more that one domain name pointing to the same hosting package, e.g. if I wanted to have both the .com and .co.uk of a domain?

[scottyman]

yes - that's correct - I did my domain registration through them as well - was just easier and less complicated.
I'm looking into best practices at the moment - in all likelihood it will be a guide on setting up IMP (webmail) on postfix on mandrake... using webmin to administer it, it's relatively easy, and free which is always nice... using webmin you can have a box sitting in a closet and remotely administer it over http.
I'll let you know when I've made some progress. just need to get my soundcard working nicely in linux so I can write and listen to tunes at the same time