Very Computer

1. Local mail server using Microsoft Outlook Express as *pure* network client

Dear Linux users

I have a small LAN with heterogenous platforms and operating systems and a
Linux box as server with modem, running IP masquerading. At the moment, I've
installed appropriate e-Mail clients, especially Microsoft Outlook Express
(WfW 3.11, Win 98 and Macintosh), and I'm using standard POP3 and SMTP as
protocol to a "popper".

Everything works fine, but the *big* drawback is the problem that all these
e-mail clients save the users mail to the local hard drive. At the moment
WWW surfing is possible from any machine but for e-mail, everybody in my
family (it's a private LAN at home :-)) needs his specific machine for
reading and writing mail, else the mails are scattered on every local hard
drive which is a big mess in handling.

In my company, we have Microsoft Office Outlook 97 which allows a proper
network client operating so all the mail are centrally stored on a Exchange
server.

What I'd like to do, is the same thing on my Linux box: I'd like to using
"fetchmail" to get the mails from my provider's POP server (later perhaps
"sendmail" will receive them directly when I have a leased line), but they
should kept stored on my Linux box and Outlook Express & Co only should give
a sight to the stuff. Note that I want store received mail as well as
transmitted mails, so everybody has his centrally stored mail repository on

trouble that the sent mail is on the local hard drive.

Following some questions:
1.) Are POP3 and SMTP perhaps capable to keeping mails on the server, the
same with sent(!) mails? I only saw some options in Outlook Express.

2.) What about MAPI (Message Application Programming Interface) and Linux?

3.) Or does IMAP (in another article on this newsgroup, imapd is mentionned)
exactly offer that, what I want? Which are IMAP capable e-mail cliens for
Windows 3.11, Win 98 and MacOS 8.0?

4.) Alternate idea: I already succesfully installed the Samba package, so is
there perhaps a way to store C:\WINDOWS\Profiles centrally on the Linux box,
so I get distributed personal profiles? I only fear that every kind of
e-mail client uses its *proprotary* file format so they wouldn't be
interoperable... :-(

5.) I'm also using the Microsoft Office package with Outlook at home so is
there perhaps a Linux project to emulate an Exchange compatible mail server?

Important note: It doesn't matter when somebody has a good idea :-) which
needs to change to another e-mail client such as Netscape Mail, Eudora or
another one, becauce a once done migrating operation (export all these
scattered mails and import them to the server) is not a problem for me...
:-) I only want capable to see received and sent mail from every station and
be able to use <A href="mailto:..."> without the scattering problem... :-)

Any good ideas to solve that problem are appreciated. :-)

                  Greetings from Switzerland
                             Andreas

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