--On Friday, March 02, 2001 11:20:35 AM +0100 Per Steinar Iversen
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The O'Reilly book "Managing IMAP", page 54, lists 4 rather common
> clients that do not support shared folders: StarMail 5.1, Outlook
> Express 5.0, Netscape 4.61 (Netscape has some strange proprietary ACL
> stuff), Eudora 4.3
Maybe I should pick up a copy.
> At our site Netscape 4.*, Outlook Express and also ExpressIT! are
> common, only Netscape 4.* is able to view shared folders in a useful
> manner, we need to support all clients.
>
> A solution would be to switch to better clients. So far we have not
> found anything really interesting: Mulberry is too complicated for
> non-technical users, Eudora is not very good at LDAP etc. I would be
> quite interested in a client that do both IMAP and LDAP well.
I'm not at all sure what you mean by "too complicated for non-technical
users" since there is a portion of the Linfield community that have a
hard time figuring out how turn their computers on and numbers of the
student population who will call into the help-desk about a problem on
their personal computer and don't know whether the machine they own is
a Mac or a PC. They nevertheless use Mulberry. Mulberry, in fact, is
the only client we formally support. Folks can use what they want, but
if they have a problem with it, they're on their own. And Mulberry
also comes with an admin toolkit that lets us preconfigure the binary.
My experience at least, has been that most non-technical users don't
want to have to learn anything new and resist it everyway they know
how. But when we add new functionality to our servers and their client
package of choice isn't capable of using it, then they either live with
it or move to the more sophisticated client. We don't take away any
capability that was already there. We still have users that insist on
using Pine (the email package of choice five or six years ago), and I
make sure that we don't do anything that breaks Pine. But if you
insist on using Pine and receive a MIME attachment that you want to
extract, don't come to me. In fact, many of our so-called
non-technical users prove that they are the very opposite in the
efforts they expend to extract that attachment (saving it on the
server, FTP'ing it, editing the headers, un-uuencoding it, etc.
-- Rob
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
/\_\_\_\_\ /\_\ /\_\_\_\_\_\
/\/_/_/_/_/ /\/_/ \/_/_/_/_/_/ QUIDQUID LATINE DICTUM SIT,
/\/_/__\/_/ __ /\/_/ /\/_/ PROFUNDUM VIDITUR
/\/_/_/_/_/ /\_\ /\/_/ /\/_/
/\/_/ \/_/ /\/_/_/\/_/ /\/_/ (Whatever is said in Latin
\/_/ \/_/ \/_/_/_/_/ \/_/ appears profound)
Rob Tanner
UNIX and Networks Manager
Linfield College, McMinnville OR
(503) 434-2558 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
