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Need a suggested email client for...

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I have 200 students which I am looking at providing email for via Sendmail on a Linux server. Our school has approximately 50 machines across three labs for student use. These client machines all run Windows 98 and log in via an NT 4.0 domain. Each student uses their own username and password, though students do not have their own profiles.

Can anyone recommend a good email client for use in this situation? I'm hoping to find a way students can get their email from any machine.

Thanks!
Take care,
Mike Oliveri
mike@mikeoliveri.com

3 replies

by tomsal

Regardless of what mail client you use you'll have a small issue on your hands.

That issue is if the students are sharing the computers and each student has their own mail account AND you want them to have the freedom of accessing their mail from any single computer you have - what about their mail being spread throughout every computer they go to over time?

Unless your students are highly disciplined in never saving any email (always deleting) - this could get quite troublesome.

Example: I log into system 1 on Monday retrieve 4 emails (which save to system 1's HD).

Tuesday comes along, I log into system 2 to get mail this time.

Now I have some of my mail items on system 1 and some on system 2.

Obviously the way to go is to set up your clients to save the mail to the server and not the local system's HD. This is more based on what your mail server does than anything, and I don't know "sendmail" all that well.

I know you can do this with MS Exchange.

At any rate - pick any mail client - the client doesn't matter all that much to be honest. The only thing that REALLY matters is that it supports standard mail protocols - SMTP, POP3, etc. (Of course it matters that the protocols the client supports are also supported by the server).

In your case, with Win98 systems I'd say just give Outlook Express a try - its free (included with OS intially and you can get it with Internet Explorer).

If you don't like that - check out Eudora (I forget what version they are up to now). Eudora is very good IMHO.

Too bad you have your mail server already...I'd suggest IMAIL - which supports web messaging, which requires NO mail client at all! (You email through the browser).

WE

by tony

Give the users access to the Linux server and make sure it has Pine....seems to be the easiest solution to me. Then they can just telnet into the server do email and get out. The only issues that you will have to deal with on this solution is how will they get attachments and printing. This is a down and dirty way of getting email access. Our solution at a small college was this and if they got an attachment like a WORD document that they could not open within PINE they would just forward it totheir personal email address like hotmail.com or yahoo.com.
Not perfect but it works.

Good Luck,
Tony

by japerez

Hi, here at UAA we are starting with a program called IMP (www.horde.org/imp/3.0/) which makes your linux users's mailboxes available via web pages... it requires IMAP, Web Server (Apache works fine), MySQL, PHP and Horde packages...
think it's very useful because it allows access
not only in campus but anyware as well.

HTH

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