Handling Mulitple Accounts/Dial-ups 1

[ShawnF]

Hello,

One of our employees with a laptop that travels across country uses a DSL connection at home and a 56k modem on the road to access Internet and our email. We don't have direct dial-in to our Exchange 2000 server for the remote users, they can download email from our server but the outgoing must go through the ISP's server.

How do you handle users that have multiple ISP's simultaneously set up on the same computer with regards to them sending/receiving email? Depending on which ISP is being used at the moment, outgoing email may or may not work depending on what the accounts are set up with. In total there are 3 accounts on his computer, one a dial-up ISP email account with lots of local access numbers, two his work email, and three his DSL email account. The DSL and dialup are not with the same company, and the DSL modem that stays in one location only (obviously).

Short of having to re-enter the outgoing mail server name everytime the Internet Access method changes, how else could this be resolved? I've been trying to get him to use his work email address account soley for work and stop using his DSL and dial-up for work email, but that has proved difficult. Plus I don't imagine it would be easy to have to constantly change what account he's sending from every time he sends and email.

Thanks!

Shawn

 

[Davetoo]

What is the e-mail client?

 

[ShawnF]

Oops, I forgot that tidbit of information. It's Outlook 2000.

 

[InnoTech]

this is something i work with everyday. the ONLY way to use outlook in that way is to do what you are not wanting to, keep changing the outgoing mail servers. however here is a couple other choices for him.

first you can see if you can have all mail forwarded to one account (the dail-up would be the best) and while he's gone all email will be delivered to the one account no matter what email acount its emailed to.

or if they are all pop3 emails you can go to

http://www.mail2web.com

and set-up a account there (free!) and it will allow you to set-up a sort of profile in which you can enter in all three accounts and when on the road you can check all three acounts from there. what it does is, when check mail it will download email headers (from, subject, size, days) at that time they are all still on the mail servers. if he selects do read one of the emails it will then download it from the server. this is really cool becuase when i go to a friend's house out of town i just go to

http://www.mail2web.com/interNETech

and put in my password BINGO! there's all my emails for 3 email accounts.

i hope this helps you. "Jack of all trades. Master of none."

 

[Davetoo]

Hmm, I think there is a way to handle this without redoing the servers all the time.

First, I'll assume he's running Outlook in Internet Only mode. Go to Tools and Accounts and setup an account for each instance of how he connects to get his mail. Set each one with the same POP3 server, but with the ISP's (or networks) SMTP server.

Now, on the Tools - Accounts window, you'll see a Type field, and the three mail type accounts you just setup. One of them will have a (default) beside it. That is the current default account, and if you try to send an e-mail it will use that account to send. So, if he's logged in to mail1 account, and it has the default beside it, all is well. If he's logged in with mail2 account, then highlight the appropriate mail account and select the "Set as Default" button to the right. Now that mail account will handle sending the mail.

Ok, lastly, on that same window, if you select the Properties for each of the three mail accounts, on the General tab at the bottom you'll see a check box for "Include this account when receiving mail or synchronizing". For the two accounts that are not in use, uncheck the box for each one. That way a send/receive won't check his mailbox three times. Alternately, you can uncheck all three, then instead of using the Send/Receive button, he could go to Tools - Send/Receive, and choose whichever mail account is appropriate for his current connection.

It sounds cumbersome, but it works and is a lot easier than changing the servers each time.

Now, if he's using Outlook in Corporate/Workgroup mode, he can just create a separate profile for each account, then tell Outlook to ask which profile to use whenever he runs Outlooks.

 

[InnoTech]

all of that is true however it would leave the user to make changes when on the road and when they get back also it would have them use it differently as before (clicking send/recieve then selecting account).

as far as the profiles go the same can be done by useing the Identities option of outlook express. setting different identities up for different types of connections. we don't know the cleint like you said before so who knows? lol

i was just thinking of the end user and how the easiest way might be for them. "Jack of all trades. Master of none."

 

[Davetoo]

Yes, we do. The client is Outlook 2000. And the method I provided is an alternate to changing the mail server, so that wasn't the "ONLY" way to do it. ;-)

I prescribe a certain level of intelligence to my users, up until they present evidence contrary to my assesment. A standard user could handle the situation I outlined without much difficulty after working with it for a few days.

 

[ShawnF]

Hello,

I haven't read through all the responses yet, but I can say at this point that it will be very challenging to train our users how to constantly change default accounts or constantly change the outgoing server every time a different ISP is used (much less understand why they must change all this stuff all the time when I can't understand it yet myself). That being said, it might be what we're stuck to deal with. But I do like the idea of setting up Outlook 2000 as Corporate or Workgroup and requiring a profile to select before opening email. I didn't even think of that. But I'm assuming this means that the user could only see those portions of email that were destined to that account. Another part of the problem I'm dealing with now is the same user is using both Outlook Express with account abc and work, and Outlook 2000 for account xyz and work. Despite the user liking this two program setup even though I didn't recommend it nor configure it, the user dislikes not being able to see all emails in just one inbox.

 

[Davetoo]

If you set up the users Outlook to run in Corporate/Workgroup mode, then you could have all of the incoming and outgoing mail reside in the same PST file.

Based upon what you've said, I believe your best option is to do just that. You set it up once, and when the user fires up Outlook, they simply have to choose which connection method they're using to get to the Internet at that moment.