I am looking for a way for my wife and I to download e-mails into the LX195 and then be able to access existing e-mails and contacts them from different client PCs over the network.

We currently use Outlook Express now on each individual machine but I then have to turn on that specific client PC each time I want to get a contact name or read an old e-mail.

Does an add-in exist for WHS which would allow us to do this? If so, how does this work?

Please let us know. Thanks.

Have you looked into whether or not your email provider supports IMAP instead of POP3? IMAP was designed to support exactly what you're describing and allows you to keep messages on the server, referencing them at will from multiple different clients. Switching protocols is going to be a lot easier than setting up something funky on your WHS.

--kurt

Unfortunately, they don't support IMAP. It's only POP3.

I don't necessarily need to run the e-mail application on the server. However, I would like the e-mail files and contacts on the server so I can access them from any of my client PCs.

I guess this is more difficult than I imagine. Any suggestions? This was one of the reasons why I bought the LX195 so I am not sure what do to now.

Perhaps someone can explain how they are doing this. Please let us know. Thank you.

I will readily admit that I haven't done much in this subject area, but I do know you can get a gmail account and your gmail account will have IMAP as an opiton as well as POP3. If you have the ability with your current email provider/ISP to forward email, you could then forward all your email to your gmail account. I do this part now, but I am using POP3 on my gmail account instead of IMAP.

I guess I do not care much about this downside because I forward my mail to gmail, but you might and should think about it before you forward you email to a Gmail account. What is the downside? All of your email is searchable and available to Google. Hopefully you can trust them with that data but you need to be aware they have access to it. This is a old story discussed long ago when Gmail first "came out". You know they must scan your email because they deliver targeted (and useful, I might add) advertisements to you Gmal page. I have decided to trust that Google will not misuse my email data, but your may not feel the same way.

Hope this idea helps.
George

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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I have not looked at this post from forum member bruceleeon but it looks like it might address the question you ask in the subject of this thread. You may want to look here:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4858

In the above thread go to the post on "WHS as a Free Email Server" Posted: Sat Jul 11, 2009 11:04 am

Hope that helps. Please let us know if you looked at this option and decided it was a good solution for you. Even if you decide not to use it could you please post back here saying why you decided not to use it. I ask, because I am considering using this approach as well.

Thanks and Good Luck,
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I don't think that's going to do what the OP wanted, which was to download mail from another mail server and have it live in a centrally accessible place. hMailserver is a full-fledged MTA.

To the OP, try SeaRay's other suggestion, which is to pull your mail (via POP3) to a Gmail account and then use IMAP to access GMail. There are (mostly unsupported) ways to do what you want on the LX195, but all the ones I can think of are worlds more difficult than simply finding a way to use IMAP, even if it goes through Gmail.

If you really want an LX195-based solution, your world becomes a whole lot more painful if you want to be able to access the same mail from different computers simultaneously. Then you get into issues with file locks. If you can live with one client at a time, you can potentially look at suggestions such as this one to move the location that Outlook Express stores mail. Move that to a mapped drive on the WHS and point all your Outlook Express clients at it and it might work, but it's definitely unsupported and not recommended by Microsoft.

Not trying to discourage you from your goal, but I've been down the exact same path a while back and ran into problem after problem until I gave up and went the IMAP route.

--kurt

Hi Kurt,
Thanks for your input. You have been down the road that I have not so I suspect you are right about the full email approach I mentioned. Thanks for your comment.
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

Yes. The only thing I want is to have my outlook express e-mails stored on the server so I can access them from various client PCs.

What if I place the files per user in separate folers on the LX195? I would only be accessing the files on a single client PC.

That should work, right?

There has been a ton of discussion and disagreement on the general subject of storing files in the Shared Folders where dirve extender operates. My opinion is that you should not store any multi-accessabel files ( and most that are not multi) in the Share Folders. MS, in the past, has specifically recommended against storing Outlook files (.pst, etc) and Outlook Express files on the server in the share folders. Do so at your own risk.
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I use POP3 mail services (two of them for 5 accounts) and they DO have options to leave the mail on the server. I use two clients and have configured BOTH to leave the mail in place. Once every 2-3 months I log onto the two REALLY active ones and delete everything over a week (or so) old to avoid filling up the server. This would solve your e-mail situation.

For the contacts I maintain a single contact list on my desk (Vista) machine and synchronize it (SyncToy v1.4 -- NOT V2.0 as it's broken) daily with a scheduled task to my wife's laptop. When traveling I need to remember to copy the contacts back to the desk unit before the sync operation occurs if we have made any changes. (Schedule the MSS backup to occur prior to the synchronization if you want a "safety net" there!)

The MSS is not involved except for the backups.

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch

If you decide to use Gmail... you do NOT need to forward your email to your Gmail account(s). Instead, you can configure Gmail to automatically fetch your POP3 mail... and then you can use IMAP on many email machines to connect to Gmail.

An added benefit of this approach is that Gmail spam filters seem to be excellent. You will also be able to access your mail from any web browser if you are traveling and do not otherwise have access to one of your own computers.

/Jim

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My family website: www.pappas.me

I assumed (maybe incorrectly) that atomarchio would like to keep his email address the same and not have to check the span filters in both places. My email is forwarded immediately as it hits the sever for my "primary" email address and the spam filters there do not get involved. Keeps me from having to check the spam filters there for any email someone says I should have received. If atomarich dosen't mind having to check his ISP's spam filters preiodically, then, yes, he could avoid the forwarding. I decided it was better to forward for the reasons I just stated instead of letting Gmail collect the email after his ISP filters it, thereby letting Gmail do all the spam filtering.


I agree with you on these points, Jim. I use the web access feature all the time with my web based Gmail account. And, of course, I benefit for the spam filtering Gmail does. Don't forget about Gmial's great, "lighting fast" search features within your email to search for an email you need again later. There are lots of advantages of using Gmail beyond the IMAP facilities it offers.
George

_________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle - Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist (384 BC - 322 BC)

I am not interested in using Gmail for forwarding. I did not realize how complicated this was going to be.

At this point, I would like a way to access old e-mails stored on the server for my account and my wife's account on outlook express. From what I am reading, it sounds like that is not possible.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions that I can try?

You can give WHS Outlook a try. This gets a little heavy because you have to install Outllook 2007 on your WHS which then you will have to start downloading Windows Updates for.

There is a beta version if you want to join at http://www.homeserverland.com/officemaven/default.aspx

This addin includes a client app to let you know that new emails arrived on the server.

Anyway, as I said it's a bit heavy and you should be comfortable installing Outlook 2007 on the WHS box before you attempt this. But then you should be able to access all your emails & contacts from any WHS client PC.

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HP MediaSmart EX495 E8600 3.2Ghz CPU, 4GB ram, 8TB storage including 3TB drives in pool. WHS with Active Directory, WDS, Media Center Master, Logitech server. Office 2010 server with client add-ins.
Microsoft MVP - Windows Home Server.

I'm not sure what service you use, but I use POP servers at both Earthlink and Optimum On-Line with Mozilla Thunderbird for our mail clients. As I noted above they CAN be configured to deliver the mail to multiple clients and continue to hold the mail at the server. I do manual deletions via the web on a regular basis to make certain that they servers do not reach capacity. The bottom line is that all the mail is available on either client.

I believe this is what you are looking for and it can be done with a POP server.

_________________
....JBick

EX475, 2 GB, LE-1640
PC1: Vista-->W7 Ultimate/32, (D-Drive RAID-5 Array)
PC2: Lenovo Laptop, Win XP Home SP3
2xLinksys WRT54G v1.1 and 2xNetGear GS105 Gbit switch