johndbc said:
I use outlook 2003. I would like to install it on 2 machines (I have 2 leg
copies). I wish to have one common inbox (on my desktop) that can be
accessed from time to time from my networked portable. I have tried to force
the portable(via setting registry entries) to look at the pst file on the
desktop but this does not appear to work.
I suspect that the only way I could get this to work is by using exchange
server but would like confirmation from an authoritative source.
You never mention WHAT protocol you use to access your mailbox (POP, IMAP,
or HTTP/Deltasync; we only know that it's likely that you don't use
Exchange). You never mention who is your e-mail provider.
For POP, and in the account you defined in Outlook, enable the option to
"leave messages on server". Then when you retrieve e-mails in one e-mail
client, they will still be available up on the mail server to see them in
your other e-mail client. Since this means leaving messages on the server
consumes the disk quota for your account to keep them there, you will need
to periodically clean out your Inbox folder on the server to prevent using
up all your disk quota (which would then reject any further incoming e-mails
since there would be no space to store them). You could do that by using
the webmail interface to your account to clean out the Inbox folder. Or you
could enable one of the "remove from server" options in the e-mail account
you defined in Outlook to help automatically cleanup your mailbox.
By leaving the messages up on the mail server, each of your e-mail clients
can retrieve a copy of the same message; otherwise, the default action for
POP is to RETR (retrieve) followed by DELE (delete). The "leave message on
server" eliminates the DELE (but that means you'll have to do that later to
cleanup your mailbox). If you use the "remove from server after N days"
option then you have that many days before the message might disappear from
your mailbox when it then is no longer available to your other e-mail
clients. If you set it to, say, 15 days then you have that long for your
other e-mail clients to grab a copy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_office_protocol
Alternatively, you might to check if your current e-mail provider has IMAP
access to your account. If so, use that as it is designed for access by
multiple e-mail clients, plus not only will the Inbox folder stay in sync
but also the other subscribed folders. If your current e-mail provider
doesn't have IMAP access then you might want to hunt around for a different
e-mail provider that does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imap