Re: mail or message store software

| I found your site (and mailing list) while searching the 'Net for
| information on mail or message store software. Hypermail isn't what
| we're looking for -- we don't want to convert our email to an
| html-archive -- but I thought somebody on the list might be able to
| point me towards software to replace Unix /var/mail. So far, the only
| one that I've seen has been N-PLEX Global from Isocor.

N-PLEX Global is, as far as I can see, NT based. For mail to be accessible by web browsers, it will have to be html based. If you don't want html, you'll have to use standard POP or IMAP facilities. There are in fact a coupleof widely used other similar products for Windows servers, if you want to go that way.

We use Unix. We don't generally use html for mail, but we do have this facility for colleagues who have to reach their inboxes and answer urgent mail while elsewhere in the world than at their desks. For this, our mail server uses standard ESMTP, mail goes, indeed, to /var/mail/$local_part. Where the user wants web access to his inbox, $local_part is read by Hypermail and the resulting html files stored in the web server hierarchy. This doesn't result in $local_part being altered in any way, nor its status (read or unread) changed. So when the user gets back to his desk, he can manage his mail normally using POP or IMAP. We're canging the normal web-server html access to SSL (shtml) access for added security.

In theory, our people could use APOP over the Internet, but in as much as they're mobile, this isn't a very good solution.

I've found a couple of other commercial products for Unix that use a combination of web server (i.e. html), SMTP and POP3 and in one case IMAP to manage mail. Both of these interface with the mail server's standard SMTP, POP3 and IMAP servers:

Emumail www.emumail.com, costs an arm and a leg, proprietary. CWmail/Dmail http://www.netwinsite.com much cheaper, I can't get it to work on SCO OS 5.0 and I don't really care at the moment, support_at_netwinsite.com isn't very intelligent.

Tony

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  • Original Message ----- From: Shelley Henderson <shelley_at_usc.edu> To: <hypermail_at_landfield.com> Sent: Thursday, September 30, 1999 10:47 PM Subject: mail or message store software