OT - Home networking...

[briands]

I know this is not Sage related, but I knew this community could help me out (or at least point me in the right direction).

We are adding a laptop to the home network for Christmas. This will supplement the office PC for general use (primarily NOT HTPC) for all family members. How do I set up email on these multiple machines so the user can log into either machine and get their email? Should I set the location of the mail files (.pst, address, etc) to a share on the server? What will happen if we take the laptop off network?

What about user profiles/ user files between the two machines?

Also, can anyone recommend a forum for these type of questions?

I am not a slave to any particular mail package (I use Tbird while my wife uses Outlook Express), but I am kinda cheap.

Thanks!

[malore]

The simpliest way is just to set the email clients to leave the messages on the server for a few days before deleting. This allows each computer to download their own copy of new messages. Possible downsides are spam may need be deleted on both machines, don't have access to sent messages from the other machine and can't tell if a email has been responded to. The upside is you don't have to use the same email program if you don't want to.

Otherwise you would need to enable file sharing and configure your email program in such a way that it saves the messages to a directory and path accessable to the other computer. Then hope the program is smart enough not to overwrite each other if both computers try to make changes at the same time. I don't think outlook express can do this. I've done it with eudora which uses a lock file to help prevent multiple computers accessing it at the same time. I haven't used thunderbird enough to know what it can do.

[MeInMaui]

We have the same setup at our home. I set up the e-mail programs independently on each computer to download e-mail from all of our accounts and set up rules to have the mail moved to unique 'inboxes' for each account. The critical step is to set up one of the computers to remove the mail from the server after 2 to 5 days and set up all other computers to never remove mail from the server. This way all computer have a chance to access your e-mail and each computer and/or user can have their own e-mail program. The only down side is that sent mail is only stored in the 'sent' folder on the computer that was used to send it. In practice this has not been a problem. We have been running this way for nearly 2 years. It seems to work quite well.

Aloha,
Mike

Edit: Dang it! Why am I always 2 minutes too late!?!?

[ke6guj]

The way I do my email is to have my main PC DL all of my email into outlook. I don't use my laptop at home, only when I am on the road. When I need to get to my email, I remote desktop into my main PC and open Outlook on the main PC. It works for me, but it is a single user environment, and does require internet access for the laptop whenever I want my mail.

As overkill as it may be, an exchange server would probably work perfectly for you. All the email would be stored on the server, and accessable from any computer. You could run the laptop in "cached" mode, where it would keep a cached copy of the emails and address on it. When it is hooked up to the network, it would update the cache. You could also run Outlook Web Access, so you could do your email on a webbrowser anywhere, like Yahoo or Gmail's webmail.

edit: Its funny, as time goes on, software and hardware that was originally designed for the enterprise has more and more started showing up in the home. Maybe Microsoft needs to come out with a family version of Exchange . Don't laugh, I have friends that do run their own exchange server (actually Small business server) in the home to take care of the home network for security, email, and webhosting.