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Mary and crew –

Just wanted to give you a bit of advance warning. The next issue of WOW is going to talk about the disappearance of WGPO support in Outlook 2002, and point readers here for help in figuring out what alternatives they might have.

Soooooo… if you know of a good mail server, this will be the place to mention it!

Take care.

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I don’t know about good , but here are some of the more popular ones. I tested the first 2 a couple of years ago, and we used winproxy on the home network, now we use AIM to send notes between each other.

These aren’t free like WGPO, but are affordable and not outrageous like Exchange server. (some are free for 3-5 users)

http://www.dataenter.co.at/products/smtpbeamer.htm
http://www.winproxy.cz/
http://www.proxyplus.cz/
http://mdaemon.deerfield.com/
http://www.infradig.com/infradig/inframail/features.shtml
http://www.abraxis.com/ntmail/ntmail.htm
http://www.eclipse.net/hardware/software/slmail.html

If those aren’t enough to keep you busy, try here
http://serverwatch.internet.com/mailservers.html
for a long list of mail server in varying price ranges.

Now if it was as easy to replace Net Folders. The best i can think is to use a shared network folder and save individual contacts or messages to that. The others can drag and drop into their outlook. It’s all manual but not as buggy , could use Exlife to save the outlook items to the file system. It only works on LANs though, internet users are SOL. Might be able to use VBA or WSH to copy to the file system too.

Or email everything as attachments and drag off the messages. It’s manual but works.

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We’ve been using MDaemon for a few years now and I, as a definite ‘non-professional’, find it very straightforward to use. I run 3 domains with the one server, all remotely administered from my pc. It handles both our internal and external mail.

I have minimal experience of Exchange so can not give a truly objective comparison, but I do know that most of the ‘how-tos’ asked here are so simply answered in MD. In fact, the questions asked do more to put me off Exchange than anything – the Content Filter and Aliasing features make my life just so easy.

My understanding is that the upcoming Version 4 will be all that Exchange is and more with the exception, I think, of sharing calendars.
MD to can be set to import NT accounts and act as a gateway to Exchange if needed.

Support is excellent. The author of the software regularily responds in the help forum – although I prefer the e-mail subscription service as the web forum purges after a few weeks.

As a matter of interest, alongside MD we run MailScan (Kaspersky virus checking) and RelayFax.

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i don’t think vba would be efficient but i think you could do it with a com addin.

i think the hard part will be controlling duplication, although that little problem never stopped net folders.

i expect some cleaver person will think up a solution that is better than net folders soon after XP is released.

mail can be done using an IMAP server and setting up a shared account.
can use LDAP for an address book, but it doesn’t directly use the contacts folder.
that leaves the calendar. i haven’t thought of any good ideas on that one yet. short of using one of the millions of web calendars, like mycalendar.com, that sync with outlook.

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because other improvements in ol2002 are desired?

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I have a client (12 pcs) they were looking for a way to have a common Contact list for the business. I was hoping to use Outlook but it looks like they would need Exchange Server. They were also looking at Act! Network Edition. Is there any other options. Cost is a concern.

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look at ldap. what OS are you using?

it’s not as convenient as sharing contacts via exchange, but will work for accessing the addresses.

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Thanks MJ. They are using WinME. Several of the users were using ACT! networked. They were hoping to get everyone onto Outlook since they just got IDSL. I’ll look at LDAP. Thanks

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Of these two, based on user feed back (a dozen or so at 4 geographically separated sites), Act! has proven to be the preferred option. Not sure why but I can ask the question if you like.

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They were probably thinking that ACT is more reliable?

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netfolders has always been buggy and duplicated items a lot. it was better over local wgpo, worse if sharing over the internet. if a share ended itself, you needed to start over.

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I have asked the question, will let you then (if) I get an answer.

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