[cat-n-the-hat]

how do you set up mail so that multi. user account can have access to the same mail box. My wife and I both have seperate accounts for os x and want to be able to access or combined email account no matter which person is the user.

[bborofka]

Originally posted by cat-n-the-hat:
how do you set up mail so that multi. user account can have access to the same mail box. My wife and I both have seperate accounts for os x and want to be able to access or combined email account no matter which person is the user.

Why not just enter in the same email settings for each OS X user? This will work great if your shared email is IMAP format, so that messages and folders are left on the server, and headers are updated everytime you load Mail.

[ebolla]

just move the mailbox out of the users library folder and into the ../shared folder then make alias's of the mailbox and put the alias's back into the users library folders

i think that should work
thats how i share the libraries of itunes and iphoto between users

[Brass]

Originally posted by ebolla:
just move the mailbox out of the users library folder and into the ../shared folder then make alias's of the mailbox and put the alias's back into the users library folders

i think that should work
thats how i share the libraries of itunes and iphoto between users

Have you actually tried this? I tried something similar in 10.1.x and it didn't work. It replaced the alias with a real folder. Very frustrating.

One way is (as suggested earlier) is to set the users up with the same settings. If using POP, set to not delete mail from server for a week, then each user will be able to download the messages.

This is a bit of a waste though, becuase everything would have to be downloaded twice.

Any other ideas?

[Ryøkan]

I'm no expert, but I don't think there's a way around downloading the e-mails twice, if you want them to go to different accounts.

My family has a family computer set up this way -- multiple accounts, some of which have access to common e-mail addresses. As has been suggested, we just entered the same settings. And Mail allows a single user to have multiple e-mail accounts, so you can have a personal e-mail address as well as the common one.

For us, it hasn't been a big deal downloading things more than once.

[Brass]

Another thing I tried was to write a shell script that switched users, and then ran Mail.app as the other user.

Of course this didn't work, because the other user does not have permission to use the display of the current user, so no GUI applications will work this way.

I hope Apple figures out a nice way for multiple OS X users to share the same Mail.app mailboxes/preferences one day.

[besson3c]

Why should Apple work on allowing users to access the same mailbox when this is already possible and a trivial task with IMAP?

POP3 is being phased out in many places, and I have no idea why FTP is still with us (perhaps because Windows is not preinstalled with SSH?)

I don't understand why anybody would want to use POP...

[Brass]

Originally posted by besson3c:
Why should Apple work on allowing users to access the same mailbox when this is already possible and a trivial task with IMAP?

POP3 is being phased out in many places, and I have no idea why FTP is still with us (perhaps because Windows is not preinstalled with SSH?)

I don't understand why anybody would want to use POP...

Because IMAP is an administrative nightmare, from a server-side perspective. Our mail servers here have IMAP installed, but we specifically don't let the users know, because we really don't want them using it.

POP is NOT being phased out in many places for many many years to come. THAT's why it must continue to be supported.

IMAP is designed for people who wish to have their mail stored on the server in preference to on their own machine and it is better at that than POP. POP is better for having your mail stored on your own machine than on the server.

Both protocols can do both, but they are only good at one.

FTP??? You really think that's going to disappear some time soon?

Not a chance! It's way to entrenched in too many things. Nothing to do with Windows, either. There must always be a simple and fast TEXT BASED file transfer system that is open. Although it's theoretically possible to do TEXT BASED file trasfer with AFP or SMB (or others), it's nowhere near as easy as with FTP. FTP is also far more portable at the moment.

[besson3c]

I work at a large University, and from the sounds of it, POP is more of an administrative (and definitely support) nightmare. For one, it is less secure, requires more bandwidth (to download every single thing rather than just view headers), presents a whole bunch of problems when used in combination with Webmail systems and access from elsewhere on campus, and likewise for when people's local computers become hosed (which under Win98 happens all the time).

sFTP is a text based file transfer program. It does everything that FTP does, yet most of all is secure! It is already a requirement for most servers here on campus, and since there is no loss in functionality (except programs like Dreamweaver and Contribute not supporting this), I don't see any reason why FTP should hang around.

[Brass]

Originally posted by besson3c:
I work at a large University, and from the sounds of it, POP is more of an administrative (and definitely support) nightmare. For one, it is less secure, requires more bandwidth (to download every single thing rather than just view headers), presents a whole bunch of problems when used in combination with Webmail systems and access from elsewhere on campus, and likewise for when people's local computers become hosed (which under Win98 happens all the time).

sFTP is a text based file transfer program. It does everything that FTP does, yet most of all is secure! It is already a requirement for most servers here on campus, and since there is no loss in functionality (except programs like Dreamweaver and Contribute not supporting this), I don't see any reason why FTP should hang around.

How is POP less secure? It supports SSL (see Mail.app's preferences).

POP can download headers only, and delete messages without downloading them, so the bandwidth is a non-issue (many POP mailers don't support this, but that's not a POP problem, that's a mail client problem. Just look at the MailSyphon program - it uses only POP). POP is quite versatile - you can even use it for authentication only, if you really want to (we used to use it to athenticate users in the Mac Labs years ago - it was a cludge, but it worked nicely).

POP works nicely with our webmail system, but I agree IMAP is better for that, because it keeps the messages on the server, which is what Webmail needs to do. However, we have no real problems with POP and webmail. It's dead easy to get mail out of your webmail account and into your usual Mail client once you get back to your main computer.

Are you really suggesting that because peoples computers get hosed all the time that is a good reason to phase out POP? Surely that's a good reason to phase out Windows! NOt POP And get a good backup system in place. If their computer gets hosed, their going to have to restore everything else from backup, why not their mail as well?

I agree with the sFTP thing. I was thinking of comparison with things like AFP and SMB. However, I think that programs like DreamWeaver and zillions of others supporting FTP and not sFTP is a very good reason for keeping FTP around!

[besson3c]

Interesting... I didn't know that POP could be used for those uses. I suppose it is a little more obsqure and unusual to do some of what you describe though...


here is my university's party line on this... I'm not suggesting that I buy into everything ever concluded by this university, but I thought you would be interested in their official rationale:

POP works by copying or transferring your e-mail to your local hard drive, removing your mail from the server. This behavior led to several problems for POP users at IU:


If the POP connection to the server failed during the transfer, your mail could have been lost.
You had to manage your POP e-mail in multiple locations, causing complications. For example, the e-mail client on your office computer and your home computer may have kept different copies of messages in your Inbox. In addition, if you retrieved your mail on your personal computer without keeping a copy of it on your shared computer account, you had to back up your e-mail files regularly.
It was unlikely that UITS would have been able to recover e-mail items from your account because POP e-mail was not stored on the server.




If POP mail clients logged in too frequently when checking for new mail, the performance of the mail servers for all UITS accounts was degraded.


IMAP, on the other hand, allows you to keep your mail in a central location on a mail server. This makes mail and file management easy and requires only one login to the server. Using IMAP, it is more likely that UITS will be able to restore items from your account, if the need should arise.


IMAP is a more advanced protocol than POP, having features such as allowing access to public and private mail folders, searching mailboxes, and flagging messages as read.

[car1son]

Originally posted by ebolla:
just move the mailbox out of the users library folder and into the ../shared folder then make alias's of the mailbox and put the alias's back into the users library folders

Originally posted by Brass:
Have you actually tried this? I tried something similar in 10.1.x and it didn't work. It replaced the alias with a real folder. Very frustrating.
Any other ideas?

You can do this, but you can't use an Alias. You need to use a Unix symbolic link instead.

E.g., move your home Library/Mail to a common shared location, such as /Macintosh HD/Shared/Mail (new folder, /Shared, created by admin, rw access to both users of course.)
Then in Terminal app,
cd ~/Library
ln -s /Documents/Shared/Mail ./Mail

(Do the same link from the other account as well. Both Mails should now see the same Mailboxes. I think you'll need to copy over the com.apple.mail.plist so both accounts will know about the same mailboxes.)

I was mostly interest in this as a way to relocate the mailboxes onto mounted encrypted disk images to keep them secure. The Unix symbolic link seems to allow this, while the alias does not, for reasons doubtless some Apple developer knows.