questions about Mail Clients & multiple POP/SMTP accounts

theDruid

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Joined
20 Oct 2004
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Hi all - (I'm old Xp-erience member, but this is my first visit to the OSNN)

I am helping a friend upgrade from Dial-Up to ADSL, as their local exchange has just been upgraded.

At the moment, they use an e-mail account provided by their ISP (freeserve), which they access through POP/SMTP on Outlook 2000.

Once they change ISP with the upgrade to ADSL, they will no longer be able to use the freeserve account for outgoing (SMTP) mail. They can keep the old e-mail address though and access incoming mail via POP (although you have to renew/retrieve the freeserve account every 90 days or so if you're not using it as your ISP).

So, I've got another e-mail account all ready to go for them, which they can use via POP/SMTP.

My problem is this - when I set up both accounts in Outlook 2000, if a message is received on the old (freeserve) account, Outlook wants to reply to the message with freeserve, even if the other new account is set up as the default.

This will not be possible once the SMTP on the freeserve account stops working.

Does anyone know how you can force Outlook 2000 to send all outgoing messages (including replies/forwards etc..) with the default account, regardless of which account they were received on?

I might be able to persuade my friend to change mail client if necessary, as their setup is going to change a little with the upgrade anyway. I'm not too keen on Outlook 2000, and they don't use anything that's not there in Outlook Express. Or perhaps they should try the Mozilla client - is it called Thunderbird? I rate Mozilla very highly.

Does anyone have any helpful suggestions for me?

thanks,
theDruid.
 
I used Outlook 2003, but it shouldn't be much different from Outlook 2000.

When composing a message, you should have a little dropdown up top that allows you to choose which account you want to send with. You can specifically choose your default account everytime you send mail.

Another idea would be to go into your account settings of the older e-mail account and change the SMTP server to the current ISP's e-mail server. Most ISPs allow people to send mail with a from address that doesn't belong in their network as long as the IP address is part of the network.

Hope that helps. Welcome back to OSNN.
 
In Outlook click Tools > Email Accounts > View or Change ... > and select the one you want as default and clicl the button called Set as Default.
The other route could be to edit the Freeserve account so that the smtp server is the new one. This way it can still get email from the Freeserve account and when you sent it, it will use the new one. Not the route I would suggest.
Also with the Freeserve account you might want to set the reply email address to the new one ... this way anyone who may get an email from the Freeserve account can only reply to the new one.
Hope that helps...
 
thanks for the ideas guys, but those are already things I'd considered and decided against:

  • I need the settings to just work automatically 'in the background' - my friend is not very 'techie' and they'll forget if they have to adjust settings every time they reply to a mail - then I'll get a phone call to say that their computer is broken again when they get error messages!
  • I can set the default account fine, but Outlook still wants to use whichever account a message was received on to reply - it ignores the default setting for replies.
  • I thought about making the outgoing SMTP settings on the old account use the new SMTP server to send mail out, but I think this is a bit of a messy workaround.
  • I will set the reply address on the old account to the new one, but there's going to be very little 'overlap' time as the upgrade to ADSL is imminent, and as soon as the connection changes over, it won't be possible to send mail out on the (old) freeserve account anymore.
I'm currently trying setting up different e-mail clients with the two accounts, and see if I can get them to do what I want - Thunderbird first, and someone recommended Eudora (although I didn't like it much last time I tried it.)

I'll post the results for future reference.

Thanks again anyway,
theDruid.
 
Why not setup Thunderbird to access both of the e-mail accounts? I have two accounts setup with Thunderbird and it works fine. If that is too difficult for them to handle the Netscape mail client is very similar to thunderbird, so it is pretty easy to use Netscape for one and Thunderbird for the other.
 
Outlook handles multiple accounts Thunderbird handles it the same way as outlook. This is not a software issue but a configuration issue.
 

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