mail using Netscape Mail over samba ?

[Gerhard Klein]

Hello Zsolt,

we are using Netscape 4.x with NT4.0. Every user who logs in gets his own
network drive e:\. f. e. samba [home]. All his mail, adressbook, options
etc. are in e:\netscape. We are using only one netscape profile. This
netscape profile is configured to use e:\netscape for user data. We name
this profile default, but the name isn't importent.

The trick is, that the netscape profile- and path-name is a part of
regestry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. The profile- and user-data are in e:\netscape
which depends on user login.

This should also run with Windows 95/98 - try it.


Gerhard

Tulassay Zsolt schrieb:

> Hi folks,
> (as far as I can remember, this is my first mail ever sent to an
> english mailing list, and surely the first to a samba-list.)
>
> I am the proud administrator of a Linux box running RedHat 5.2 and
> samba-1.9.18p10 (2.0.3 didn't work properly but that's not my
> problem here). The samba server provides domain logon for the
> windows machines in our network. The whole thing has only been
> running for two days now, so I'm just starting to configure it.
> Just to be clear, there are machines which are used by only one
> person, but there are others which are used by lots of users
> simultaneously. But all of them are runnng Win95/98.
>
> My problem is how to provide email service for our users, ie.
> which mailer software to use and over which protocol (POP/IMAP/etc).
> I had an idea, namely that if a user logs on the samba server,
> he can access his UNIX mail folders directly through his home dir.
> So what if I tried to set up Netscape Communicator to use H:\mail as
> the mail directory (where H: is the drive letter where the home dirs
> get mounted) and so I could avoid having to use IMAP (I had lots of
> trouble using IMAP earlier).
>
> I gave it a try and it seemed to work. But then came the real
> problem, you may already know what I mean: Communicator puts user
> settings into various files on the hard drive to which pointers
> are made in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in the registry. Which is machine
> dependant. So I couldn't get it to handle the different settings for
> different users.
>
> I had first the idea to add some registry keys at every logon
> which could fix this up, but then I couldn't manage to get it right.
> Then I thought about the Roaming Profiles, installed the Apache module
> mod_roaming, and seemed happy, but it turned out, that Netscape tried
> to use the same roaming access profile every time, regardless of the
> username I used to log in to the samba server.
> And I couldn't find any hint where it stores the roaming access
> settings locally (I didn't find anything in the registry).
>
> What I'd like to achieve is, that if somebody logs in to our domain,
> he could read his email through some Windows mail client software
> regardless of which computer he uses to log in from.
> (after all it can be some other than Netscape Mail as well, I just
> thought NSMail would be the easiest way to go).
>
> If somebody managed to get this right, I would really appreciate if
> he could help me. Well, if you have a solution based on IMAP, I don't
> mind. I have to admit I don't even know how to get to work NSMail
> using IMAP on the windows boxes).
>
> Or if you could name me some mail clients that work together
> with Navigator and put their stuff into HKCU I would be fairly
> happy with that as well.
>
> Sorry for the long letter.
> TIA,
>
> Zsolt Tulassay
>
> PS please CC to me, I only get the digest

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