mail using Netscape Mail over samba ?

Hugh E Cruickshank hugh at forsoft.com
Thu Apr 1 01:30:59 GMT 1999


Hi Zsolt:

I think that we have done what you a attempting to do but
with SCO OSR5.0.4. We opted to use the Microsoft Windows
Messaging software that comes with Win95 but it think the
technique should work with any MAPI type software (say
Outlook).

1. We created a subdirectory on our user's UNIX home directory
   in a pre-exec script ("win/exchange").

2. We created a netlogon batch file that always mounts the
   user's home directory to the same drive letter ("H:").

3. We manually reconfigured each of our Win95 boxes to store
   the "Personal Folders" and "Addressbook" files on the home
   directory (in "H:\WIN\EXCHANGE\").

4. We configured the software to use POP and SMTP to communicate
   with the UNIX host to receive and sendmail.

This is far from ideal but it works. It was to be an interim 
solution for us but my users are so entrenched now after 3-4
years that they threaten to revolt every time I talk about
introducing a "real" MUA.

I am sure there are better ways of doing this but this might 
give you some ideas to start with. Good luck and if you need
any more details on what we did please let me know.

Regards, Hugh

-- 
Hugh E Cruickshank, Forward Information Systems, www.forsoft.com

----------
From: 	Tulassay Zsolt
Sent: 	Wednesday, March 31, 1999 16:33
To: 	Multiple recipients of list
Subject: 	mail using Netscape Mail over samba ?


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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