HOWTO setup mail services using Outlook

The Network Concierge uses Sendmail a mail transport agent using the SMTP protocol.  As an E-mail server the Network Concierge will send and receive mail via the Internet/Intranet on behalf of unlimited number attached client machines. E-mail setup is completely automated. All you have to do is setup users and their passwords in order for them to send and receive e-mail – with any standard e-mail utility, such as Outlook Express, Eudora, Netscape Messenger, etc.

You send mail using a fully qualified address similar to user@domain_name where "user" and "domain_name" are valid Network Concierge (NC) user/domain names. For this example the NC domain name that will be used is "brady.com".   Therefore if you wanted to send mail to user “mike”, then you would address the mail to mike@brady.com. The mail application may or may not complain if you do not provide a fully qualified address. It is up to the Email application on how unqualified email addresses are handled before they are sent to the email server (e.g., the Concierge).

Following is an example on how to set up a domain “brady.com” and create valid Network Concierge user accounts.   These users are automatically setup for Concierge mail accounts and any mail to these accounts will be spooled until retrieved by local clients using standard mail applications. To setup the domain name go to the Main Concierge Administrator page by entering the Concierge hostname URL address as shown.

Next click on the Hammer ICON and login to access the Network Concierge Configuration Web Page.  You will need to login as concierge administrator by entering the username “concierge” and the appropriate concierge password to gain access to the NC Configuration Web Page.

After successfully logging in, you can specify the Intranet Domain Name by clicking on the Intranet ICON that will take you to the Intranet configuration form.  From this form, click on the appropriate “Configure” button for the current Intranet mode of operation.  In this example the INTRANET is setup in Automatic mode, therefore we would click on the first Configure button which would pop up the “Intranet automatic configuration form.   From this form you can enter the desired domain name.  For this example we will use the “brady.com” domain name.

After setting up the domain name, you will need to create users.  These users are added to the Network Concierge configuration database by clicking on the “Users” ICON on the “Network Concierge Configuration Web Page”.  From the “User configuration” form, you can add users.  Each user you enter must be given a unique username and a corresponding password.  It is recommended that the username/password pairs match the username/passwords of the local client system, user accounts. The reason for this is that the user is authenticated when attempting to access a Network Concierge share resource via Network Neighborhood.  For this example, I’ve added the entire Brady Bunch clan as users as

illustrated by the following “user configuration” form.

Now to setup Outlook Express mail accounts using the Network Concierge as the mail server click on the desktop Outlook Express shortcut.  Then add new mail accounts by selecting the Tools à Account option from the top toolbar, which will open up the Internet Accounts dialog box. 

From the Internet Accounts dialog box select the Mail tab and click on the Add mail button which will start up the Internet Connection wizard.  Use the wizard to add the user mail accounts as shown below.  

The Internet Connection Wizard will direct you to enter the display name,  email address, server names, internet logon name and password, connection type  and  finish  via the following dialog screens.

Once you click finish you will be returned to the following screen from where you can modify the mail account properties.  Select the pop.brady.com mail account and click the properties button which will pop up a  new dialog screen via which the pop.brady.com account name can be modified to something more meaningful.

In this example, the pop.brady.com mail account name was changed to Marcia and the Organization and Reply address fields were filled out for completeness.  After entering the new data click OK which will take you to the Internet Accounts screen.  Notice that the mail account name is now displayed as Marcia.

For this example, I proceeded to add a mail account for each member in the Brady_Home_LAN organization.  (i.e. the BradyBunch)   Note that upon completion, the following Internet Accounts  screen reflects all nine BradyBunch mail accounts.

After you’ve created all your mail accounts you can verify mail communication be composing one or more mail messages and sending them to users within your local domain.  You can send mail to the Internet as long as you are properly setup with an Internet connection.  To send a mail message click on the Compose Message button on the main Outlook Express window toolbar.  This will open up the mail composition window from where you can specify the destination email address, the subject line information and the message body content.  Once you are finished composing a mail message simply click on the send mail button which will queue the message to be sent.  You can queue multiple messages and then when you are ready to transfer all of them simply click on the Send and Receive button.

The following window pops up when composing a mail message.  In the following examples, Alice which email the entire Brady clan, including herself, a friendly hello message.   Click the Send button after completing each mail message.  Then once all messages have been created and queued for transmission, click “Send and Receive” button which will transfer them over the LAN.  In this sample case, each mail message will be sent to the corresponding user mail account on the brady.com domain where it will be processed and routed to the appropriate mailbox by the Network Concierge mail server.  The mail messages are retrieved from the corresponding user mail account during the receive portion of the “Send and Receive” sequence.

The Outlook Express will look something like this after retrieving the mail messages that were processed by the Network Concierge mail server.  NOTE:  In this example,  I used the Alice mail account as the default account for send email messages to each member of the Brady clan.  This messages were sent out over the LAN, processed by the Network Concierge mail server, stored in each local user mail account and then they were retrieved from the concierge mail server and deposited into the Outlook Express application Inbox.