outlook express sharing

[knowall]

I have just bought a new computer running Windows xp and want to enable all four family users to have access to our ntlworld e mail 'family' e mail address which we access through outlook express. At the moment it has to be accessed through me when I log on - I want all four of us to be able to access it via our own 'log ons' if you know what I mean! Many thanks in anticipation.

[darth vader]

Outlook express is not very multi-user "friendly" as i found the same problem with setting it up for my family. The only way round it that i could find, was to have each person configured with their own email address (you can get freebie email accounts these days with many host names to one domain name eg. [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]....), then log on as each person, and configure their outlook express separately for their own personal email account. Or you could be really flash and buy an email server (eg exchange)........

[j2buttonsw]

If when you logon as [email protected] you also pickup mum@, child a@ and child b@ mail then then tick the "leave a copy of the message on the server" on the Tools > accounts [account name] > properties > advanced tab. This means you can setup the email collection for each user to download the entire mailbox and will have all of your emails downloaded even if they have been downloaded by another user earlier.

[darth vader]

the flaw to this plan, j2b, is that the emails would collect on the server, until saturation. The workaround is to have one account setup to delete from server, the rest to not delete - this poses problems in itself as what if this account deletes, before all other accounts have got a copy? You would also have problems with synchronisation when one user deleted the email locally.

[darth vader]

basically outlook express is pants in a multi-user environment, but exchange server is a bit expensive - you may wish (knowall) to investigate cheaper or freeware email servers which could do the job of an exchange server, in fact Turnpike springs to mind immediately http://www.demon.net/products/turnpike/

[knowall]

Thanks very much both for your replies. I'm going to see how using j2's solution works... it was never a problem with Windows ME when we just all mucked in with the one desktop etc. May just revert to not having separate logins...but it is useful having one's own space!

[j2buttonsw]

If you use Outlook instead of Outlook Express you could share a common .pst file (personal folder) and avoid the problems of exceeding your server mailbox limit as darth correctly pointed out.