Updated on Sept 6, 2007
We use the e-mail account supplied by our ISP for my e-mail and as a general mailbox for important incoming mail and news letters. My wife and son also have accounts on hotmail, etc.
In our case the most flexible solution is to use web browsers on all our machines, including my OS4 machine, to access the webmail tool available at our ISP homepage. This way we can use any machine that is available, without the hastles and pitfalls.
Here is the rest of our story, to give a bit of insight as to why we came to this conclusion ...
At first, we were using two machines, a PC and an Amiga 2000HD. We used Netscape Mail on the PC, while I tinkered with various Amiga e-mail programs and home-brew scripts.
Since we already had a working solution on the PC, it was not a priority to get e-mail working on the Amiga.
I learned very quickly that it can become very tricky to manage e-mail if you are using more than one machine or more than one program to access the same account on a POP3 mail server, especially if both are set to download mail and delete the mail from the server. Inevitably, you reach a point when you login with one machine and receive a reply to e-mails that originated on the other machine. The same thing can happen if you are testing more than one e-mail program on the same machine.
Now, we have three machines running Windows XP (a large tower, a mini tower and a laptop), as well as my OS4 machine.
On my OS4 machine, I have SimpleMail and YAM. I have used both and I think they are both very nice programs. I have not decided which one I like best. SMTPpost and AmiPOP also run on OS4, so I have been experimenting with my home-brew e-mail scripts as well.
Ultimately, it comes back to the old questions about downloading e-mail from the POP3 server. Do I delete from the server or not? What happens if I download a reply intended for one of the other members of the family and we can't read the attached documents on my machine? The newsletters are another problem. I can read pdf files but not word documents.
On the Windows XP machines, we use web browsers to access e-mail. We access our main e-mail account through a webmail link on our ISP home page. This is a very flexible solution for us, since it allows us to use any machine that is available. I can also access the e-mail this way with my OS4 machine using AWeb or IBrowse.
In our case the most flexible solution for e-mail, is to use web browsers on all our machines, including the OS4 machine. This way we can use any machine that is available, and we don't have to maintain e-mail programs, folders or archives on any of the machines
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redfox
