An email management problem

[VisionsOfCody]

Hi

I've just finished a site for a client who's got about 8 or 9 different email accounts and wants to be able to access all of them from 3 different devices (1 PC in the office, 1 PC at home and some kind of mobile thingy)

so - easy peasy, I thought - just set up all the email clients to access all the accounts

but that's no good - because when he has read an email on his home PC he wants to be able to answer that same mail from his office and vice versa - without crazily duplicating millions of mails to various alias addresses or forwarding or whatever

so what I think he needs is some kind of centralized email client that gets the mail from all of the accounts and that can then be accessed directly from any of the devices which all show the same account

I hope I've explained that clearly ....

does anyone have any experience of this kind of set up ?
what's it called ?
what does it require ?


thanks for any help you can give me on this one

[stolzyboy]

you can use any webmail client like squirrelmail/horde/etc...

OR you can have the email clients keep a message on the server for a specified amount of days to give all the emaill clients enough time to download them locally, then they'll disappear off of the server after X amount of days...

if you go the webmail route, keep in mind that if he should use a real local email client to retrieve the emails that they will be unavailable to the webmail clients (unless using the forementioned leave on server method)

hth,
stolzyboy

[bpat1434]

I use 2 different IMAP accounts (cuz I don't use my gmail that much) and have thunderbird on both my Desktop and Laptop, and use EmailExchange on my phone. Each accesses my IMAP accounts and when I read a message on one "client", it's perpetuated across the other programs because of the IMAP server.

In his case, I'd suggest he either consolidate to one, or try and see if he can get IMAP access to them all. If he consolidates, he can still "mimick" his 8 or 9 addresses using the reply-to: header to send the mails back to a specific account.

I'd also have to question what he needs with 8 or 9 accounts.....

[VisionsOfCody]

thanks for your replies !

that IMAP thing sounds perfect - what do you need for that ? I don't have much server rights cos it's all on shared hosting :-(

The guy has a lot of mail accounts because he's one of these financial wheeler-dealer types who's got millions of companies and subsidiaries and stuff - all very complex

[piersk]

Generally any hosting company worth their salt will provide IMAP and POP3 as standard, so you've probably already got it, but you just didn't know.

[VisionsOfCody]

Generally any hosting company worth their salt will provide IMAP and POP3 as standard, so you've probably already got it, but you just didn't know.

you're right - I just checked :))



thanks