[SusanG]

Has anyone managed to get Thunderbird working on a network? I'm a new convert to Macs and have an iMac and a MacBook connected by a wireless network. It doesn't look as though Mail will work on a network and Thunderbird looks pretty good, but any advice anyone could offer would be greatly appreciated.

SusanG

[OreoCookie]

Mail works on a network as does Thunderbird. If you would explain in a little more detail what you actually want to do, we could help you.

[SusanG]

Thanks for responding so quickly. I'd been told on an Apple forum (I think) that Mail didn't work on a network, so that's why I'd moved on to Thunderbird.

We have an iMac and MacBook (both Intel) connected via a wireless network. Our main e-mail address (editors@companyname.co.uk) is also our username with our ISP, but we also use additional e-mail addresses (sales@companyname.co.uk, news@companyname.co.uk etc) which our previous mail software (on PCs) used to file incoming mail in a number of mailboxes, according to what e-mail address they were sent to. I've managed to replicate this is Mail by setting up additional mailboxes and using Rules to divert mail to them. I've done all this on the iMac.

What I would like to do is to forward on to the MacBook the contents of two of the mailboxes. I thought that I might do this automatically by, in the appropriate Rule, telling Mail to perform the following action and move the message to the MacBook, but I didn't know what to put in the 'to mailbox' box. I would quite happily perform this action manually, if I only knew what to do!

Is all this of any help? In spite of this difficulty (and one with formatting an external hard disk) we are still enthralled with our Macs and so happy finally to have escaped from the clutches of our PCs. We should have done this years ago!

Many thanks.

[OreoCookie]

I think you are making your life a bit difficult here and you simply went about it the wrong way

What I would first of all suggest is that you create personalized e-mail addresses and then configure the two e-mail addresses you have in such a way that all mails are forwarded to the appropriate users (either you should be able to do that directly at your ISP's configuration page that you have used to create these mail accounts in the first place).

editors@company.co.uk forwards to all editors, say susi1, joe1, susi2 and joe2.
sales@company.co.uk forwards to all people working for sales, e. g. susi2, joe1, susi3, joe3

(You will need personalized e-mail addresses for sure in a business, trust me.) This way, all editors and people in sales will receive the same e-mails. If you want all people to have all e-mails that are sent by anyone in sales or any editor, you can set up a rule to send a bcc (blind carbon copy) to editors/sales@company.co.uk.

Furthermore, set up two accounts in Mail, (1) sales/editors@company.co.uk and (2) susi1@company.co.uk. When you send mails to customers just as `sales department', then set the reply address to sales@company.co.uk. However, sometimes you may want to customers/other people to reply only to you -- then you send the e-mail with your personal e-mail account. This way, you can also share only e-mails which concern the addresses sales/editors@company.co.uk.

This will work with Mail and presumably with Thunderbird as well. What other people were thinking of requires you to spend (a lot of) money to set up a server. However, Mail should work just fine.

[SusanG]

Sorry for the delay in coming back to this, but I've been enjoying a few days away from computers.

I've come to the same conclusion — we need two e-mail accounts. At present I deal with e-mails to editors@, sales@ and myname@ and my other half deals with news@ and hisname@, so we are going to set up a second account for sales@ and hisname@. Simple really. I was doing my usual thing of looking for the complicated answer to the question. This solution also has the advantage of continuing to use Mail, rather than switching to another program. We both like the integration of Mail and Address Book, which is already proving to be a useful resource.

Many thanks for the advice.

[OreoCookie]

Well, I don't think you would want to pay for the other solution.

But yes, rather find a simple solution Good luck.