Newsgroups: comp.sys.novell
Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!csi.uottawa.ca!news
From: michel@csi.uottawa.ca (Michel Racine)
Subject: Re: Mailreader for PC...like Eudora ?
Message-ID: <1991Jun26.130009.19163@csi.uottawa.ca>
Keywords: n
Sender: news@csi.uottawa.ca
Nntp-Posting-Host: csi0
Organization: CSI Dept., University of Ottawa
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 91 13:00:09 GMT

Jonathan Bucki was saying:

>I'm looking for a PC-UNIX mailreader for use on a novell network.  I can't use
>something like a pegasus/charon setup because we'd like to keep all the
>mail on a centralized mail server instead of dishing it out to many
>machines.  Does anyone have any suggestions?

I have been investigating this area in the past few weeks for our own needs.
We evaluated both POP clients and charon.

Popmail and pcpop use the
post-office protocol and do give you centralized mail, which is great. But
one major requirement was to let the PC user know about mail just being
received (sort of like biff). None of the popmail clients that we saw
allowed you to do that. They also could not tell you that you had mail
when you logged in to novell. Another negative aspect was that both software
had annoying interfaces and 'features'... (eg: popmail cannot display
more than 4 pages of a mail message).

The combination of charon/pmail poses the disadvantage of decentralizing
mail (we are in the process of setting it up, so I don't know exactly
how decentralized - eg, when you send mail from pc to pc, can you force
it to go to the unix host first?). But charon will notify you when
mail just came in. Pmail has an excellent user interface. Charon also
gives you seamless network-wide printing between unix and novell,
which is something else we are after...

I have not come up with a final decision yet, but charon/pmail are likely
to win. Please let me know if you find other means of doing this. I haven't
examined MHS from Novell. What can it give? Is it still decentralized? Are
there other pop clients (other than popmail and pcpop)? Do you know how
to make them biff novell users when they receive mail?

Cheers!

-- 
Michel Racine                           | e-mail: michel@csi.uottawa.ca
Department of Computer Science          |
University of Ottawa                    | phone : (613) 564-5424
Ottawa, K1N 6N5, Canada                 | fax   : (613) 564-9486