Synchronizing one e-mail account between multiple computers

[bravacentauri83]

I work for a small business that uses Comcast as the ISP and one e-mail which we use for customer service. We have three computers that other employees use to input customer data and answer e-mails. Currently, we are using Outlook Express. We have it set up so the e-mails are not downloaded to the machine, and the messages are not deleted from the server until they are moved from the inbox folder or something like that. We would, however, like to start synchronizing our outgoing e-mails so other employees can check to see if an e-mail has been responded to. Is there a way that this can be accomplished? I'm assuming that using Outlook would be the better choice to do this. Also, is there a better way of setting up our e-mail to access the inbox across these three computers?

 

[postmortemIA]

Yes, use IMAP protocol that manages to maintain same view per user on every client machine.

Or use Exchange server which is common in corporate world - it has even more features.

But IMAP would do - even GMail supports IMAP for free and it is hard to beat.

 

[Red Squirrel]

+1 for imap. This way all the mail stays on the server so you don't have to worry about backing up workstations, just the server. You could also look into Linux software raid if you want redundancy (but still do backups).

You can also use fetchmail to grab the emails from your internet accounts then add them to your local server.

 

[bravacentauri83]

Does Comcast support IMAP? AFAIK, it uses POP/SMTP.
How easy is it to set up Exchange?

 

[postmortemIA]

Not easy, you need server, licenses, client licenses, domain, etc.

Just forward that comcast stuff to one gmail account.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Have fetchmail download mail from your pop accounts then locally (on the server that downloads it) have imap setup. Don't bother with exchange, that requires windows and costs a lot of money, not worth it. One thing I hate about ms is not only that everything is so expensive, but they make the licensing as complicated as possible so once you figure everything out its way more expensive then you first figure, and every time you add more clients you have to pay more.