[quote user="dilberts_left_nut"]Outlook can do POP3 as well, but for a shared mailbox, IMAP may suit your needs better.
[/quote]

Rolf,

Understand since POP is single threaded and IMAP is multi-tasking.

 
Thanks!

 
OMR
 

All,

I have a client that is on SBC/Yahoo and the Exchange server is causing problems because they run a dispatch service so all seven employees share two mailboxes, plus have their own private mailbox defined in OutLook.  They have to query once every 30 sec for mails to all three boxes, so with three mailboxes on seven computers 21 sessions are querying the Exchange Server constantly, which causes the Exchange server to lockout their accounts for "failed" login attempts, when it is already busy with another one of their mailboxes.

To fix this I am proposing a local mail server, like  hMailServer or Mercury to fix this.

My Question is/will Mercury support Outlook clients?

If it will this solves my problem, but if not, why not?

OMR 

Mercury supports Outlook clients, or any kind of reasonably RFC compliant POP3 or IMAP client.

I'm however not sure I understand the setup exactly. Are they using POP3 or IMAP to connect to the server? The private mailboxes are presumably not a problem, but only the two shared ones. Would it be an alternative to have all incoming mail to the two common mailboxes forwarded to each user's personal mailbox instead? And why is the interval between checks so short (30 secs)?

/Rolf
 

hMailServer currently only supports maildrop usernames in the format: username@domain, which makes it harder for mailbox sharing.

The way we configure this in Mercury is, sharing the maildrop with ambigous usernames, connected with individual aliases - and set the client not to delete emails until after f.ex. 14 days. You configure the last setting in Outlook advanced settings.

The other way to deal with this, is to configure mailing lists for the inbound email capacities, and sharing that to individual maildrops. (hMailservers list capabilities is not comparable to Mercury)

The third way to deal with this is to use maildrop filtering, forwarding the emails arriving to different maidrops, or cc them immediately to exchange.

[quote user="Rolf Lindby"]

Mercury supports Outlook clients, or any kind of reasonably RFC compliant POP3 or IMAP client.

I'm however not sure I understand the setup exactly. Are they using POP3 or IMAP to connect to the server? The private mailboxes are presumably not a problem, but only the two shared ones. Would it be an alternative to have all incoming mail to the two common mailboxes forwarded to each user's personal mailbox instead? And why is the interval between checks so short (30 secs)?

/Rolf
[/quote]

Ok so I missed this "Outlook" part in the Mercury setup, not the first time I missed something skimming over it, due to limited time.  Do however have a question about using Mercury with Outlook, will all the HTML mails be handled/passed intact or will there be any conversion?  I ask this as PMail, which I use all the time, does not handle HTML mail and that is what Mercury was built for/on.

Concerning my client, they get over 200 dispatch tickets an hour so they set themselves on one minute or 30 sec intervals to keep up with the traffic flow.  Problem they are running into, which I was told personally while working on this with SBC/Yahoo tech support, is since all seven of their computers are querying the SBC/Yahoo server independently, when one computer logs in, and locks the mailbox, with main mailbox and eight other individual accounts, then the attempt of any other computer, is tracked as a "failed login" by the Yahoo scripts.  More than 5 failed logins locks the mailbox so one has to go through Web Mail to unlock it again.  Otherwise Outlook keeps popping up a request for account password, which still fails, cause mailbox is locked.

The problem is further complicated by the fact that in-order for all the sharing to work the client must set Outlook to "leave all files on server", making a real mess out there and having absolutely no backup of the main mailbox.

All that said, we discussed it with Yahoo and they suggested we install a mail server so one (1) computer and only one computer queries the Yahoo account and downloads. This will eliminate the "failed logins" and once the server has the emails all the computers, being local on the LAN, can query the server for their mail updates instead of how it is now.  I have to add one additional thing to the final config, as they (the client) have a roving laptop, that is not connected into the LAN.  I can however resolve that problem by creating "GMail" accounts for each mailbox being currently search and have the mails forwarded to gmail from the server once the files are downloaded.

Brining all mails local will give me another headache for backups, but that's not the issue here.

Oh Yes, by all means thanks for the input!

OMR

Thanks for the input.  Still trying to absorb all this.

OMR 

Thanks for the explanation, now it makes sense to me! Setting up Mercury to download all incoming mail to the two common accounts (using Mercury's POP3 client module) is indeed likely to solve the locking problem, as suggested by the SBC/Yahoo tech support.

Mercury will not attempt to change any HTML coding in messages. (Some mail client programs might do that, though.)

When messages have been received by Mercury you can choose between having  them stay in the mailbox on the server and letting users access them with IMAP, or forward copies of all messages to individual mailboxes for each user for POP3 access (there are several ways to do this in Mercury). Having multiple users simultaneously access the same mailbox with POP3 would not be a good idea. What would be the best solution would I guess depend a lot on how the work with the incoming dispatch tickets is organized.

/Rolf 

[quote user="Rolf Lindby"]

When messages have been received by Mercury you can choose between having  them stay in the mailbox on the server and letting users access them with IMAP,

/Rolf 

[/quote]

Rolf,

Is IMAP the only way to config OUTLOOK to query Mercury?

OMR
 

Outlook can do POP3 as well, but for a shared mailbox, IMAP may suit your needs better.