Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

2 Macs, 1 Mail account on both, best way?

S

skp574

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 16, 2005
280
0
greenwich.london.uk
I have two Macs, a PB and an iMac G5. I have a .mac account and my own email account provided by my ISP.

I want to be able to read mail from both computers. What would be the best way to set up Mail to do this without wiping mail off the servers before the other computer has had a chance to download them?

I come from a PC background and use Exchange at work and keep all my mail on the server, and can see it from any computer without wiping it.

I guess I would need to wipe my mail servers at some point so I don't fill up the mailboxes?
 
There are mail options that allow you to retain a copy on the server after you have downloaded them. Even with POP accounts.
 
Although you can set POP accounts to retain your mail on the server, the service provider doesn't always guarantee that it will be backed up, long term. The POP account I had with my ISP managed to dump most of mine a while back. IMAP is your friend.

Also, with IMAP, you want to set your preferences to keep your "Sent" folder on the IMAP server, as well. Otherwise, you'll have some outgoing mail saved on one machine and some on the other. You should do this with your "Draft" folder, if you keep a lot of draft emails around.
 
Sign up for a free Yahoo (or something similar) account that can check multiple POP based email accounts and organize as you define. Not to mention they provide free virus scanning. You have to pay to be able to use custom SMTP servers to send mail from different accounts however, but $20/year is very reasonable. The only tradeoff I can see is you can't write emails offline.

This works, keeps one address book and provides other conveniences.

But if you must use Mail.app, you can change to IMAP or leave messages on the server if you use POP like others have said.
 
or do as i do and run your own imap server.

i'm migrating my exchange 2003 server over right now. it's really really fun.. [ahem :rolleyes: ]

mail.app does connect to exchange too so if you're so inclined to run your own.
 
skp574 said:
I have two Macs, a PB and an iMac G5. I have a .mac account and my own email account provided by my ISP.

I want to be able to read mail from both computers. What would be the best way to set up Mail to do this without wiping mail off the servers before the other computer has had a chance to download them?

I come from a PC background and use Exchange at work and keep all my mail on the server, and can see it from any computer without wiping it.

I guess I would need to wipe my mail servers at some point so I don't fill up the mailboxes?
Click to expand...

One word. IMAP =]
 
Yep, I went down the IMAP route. However, for some reason when I send mail from my ISP account (Plus.net for those in the UK), it does not save sent emails locally. I have selected to save them on the server, but I can't see them on the computer once I've sent them. Weird.

I can't post a pic at this time, but in Mail, my "In" has two sub-folders - my ISP account and .Mac account. The Sent folder does not save any emails I send out.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back