I am hoping that someone else has run into - and solved - this issue. For many years our company has used Netscape (until recently 4.79) messenger for our email. We have 10-15 workstations on a peer-to-peer network (Windows 2K + a couple of W98SE machines) - of which about 5 workstations access mail regularly throughout the day. Our network has a ADSL router which also functions as DHCP server allocating IP addresses to all workstations. One of the workstations is dedicated as a data server, with a RAID1 storage for all data, including mail. Mail is downloaded over the ADSL by the clients, all of which are set to store and read their mail from the network drive. This allows sharimng of all mail over the network, with the exception that no two users could access the same folder at the same time - the second to attempt doing so would simply get a "no access" message and would either wait or shout for the other user to vacate that folder.
We have just upgraded to NS7, because it offers better account management and can handle multiple accounts.It can still be configured to "point" the local directory for each mail account at a user defiend directory on the network drive. And when a single client is using NS7 messenger, it works very well. So far so good... The problem comes when two clients open mail and access the mail folders at the same time. It seems that they are both working with a cache copy of the mail, rather than the server data itself. Changes (get mail, edit, send, move, copy, trash) made by one user, is not visible on the other users platform until the other user exits and restarts his or her Netscape. Numbers of how many mails in a folder are doubled every time two clients access the folder, it does not seem that Netscape is able to share, but it seems to behave as if it is sharing, even though it is not! I called Netscape's 29 dollar help line and was told that sharing of mail directories and contents over a network is not a feature in NS7, and that we should be either using another application (!) or setting up a mail server possibly with IMAP. As far as I can see it, we need an extra application on our server to download(collect) mail at regular intervals, direct it to user defineable folders according to the mail account to which it was addressed, and then monitor/control client access to these folders, so that concurrent changes to folders or contents are updated without conflicts to the clients. We have downloaded over 20 trial copies or IMAP and other mail server programmes - most of which claim to be able to be set up within 10 minutes. None of these seem to be able to handle the job and allow us to continue to use Netscape 7 and share data. We are experienced data/IT people in relation to our usual tv studio applications, but we know zilIfctch about mail servers and the like - so we need some advice. 1) How should we solve this (quickly and cheaply) 2) Can a solution be found which allows the clients to use NS7, albiet with a server application collecting mail in the background? 3) If the solution is IMAP - what is the basic concept involved and how should we approach the job? Any advice would be warmly received. As I am not a regular subscriber to this newsgroup (I only discovered it this evening) please feel free to respond offline [EMAIL PROTECTED] (and remove the nospam's from this address). We've read a lot about Netscape Mail server, but cannot seem to source this product anymore, all references to it on the internet point back at "Download Netscape 7". Thanks! Best regards/Adrian Redmond, Channel 6 Television Denmark
