Mail/calendar options for small business

[Spoiler]

I need to implement a fairly simple e-mail/shared calendar setup for a small business:

3 users
2 office users (using outlook) - Rod & Jane
1 mobile user (iPhone) - Freddy

Need a shared calendar, so Jane can setup an appointment and it'll show up on Freddy's phone.

All customer email will be sent to a standard email address "[email protected]" and Rod, Jane & Freddy all need to receive these, as well as "send from" the mail@ email address.

I decided to try using a forwarder email address for the "mail@" rather than a shared mailbox, because if one of the users sees an email that isn't for them and deletes it, it'll disappear for the intended recipient. So each user had their own account and got forwarded on mail sent to "mail@"

Tested the setup out with Google apps, but it had a few annoyances:

Email: When receiving email from the outside world, it would re-write the from address to be "From: [email protected] on behalf of [email protected]".

Calendar: Seems you can't remove your own personal gmail calendar, so would have to rely on the users putting appointments, etc in the shared calendar & not their own personal one.


Also had a play with the Microsoft offering, but got similar results. Wondering if I should just try out the basic pop/imap setup you get with the web hosting company, and see if they also do workgroup calendars or similar.

Anyone done something similar or can suggest a better way of doing this ???

Thanks.

[speling bee]

I wish I could help, but my only advice is to make sure you don't bungle it.

[d000hg]

The fact millions of businesses manage to use shared calendars in Outlook/Google suggests to me the problem isn't really a big deal.

Personally I'd recommend Google if only because you can get it free.

[jmo21]

Email: When receiving email from the outside world, it would re-write the from address to be "From: [email protected] on behalf of [email protected]".

That REALLY annoys me too!

[Spoiler]

The fact millions of businesses manage to use shared calendars in Outlook/Google suggests to me the problem isn't really a big deal.

Personally I'd recommend Google if only because you can get it free.

Agreed - the calendar thing I think is not a big problem. It's the email thing that annoying !

[d000hg]

I run g-apps (not g-mail) for a couple of email accounts including my plan B and I'm not really familiar with the email address issue you are on about... if this only affects incoming mail why is it a problem? And is this specifically to do with what happens when forwarding the email?

[Moscow Mule]

Can you fix this with delegation? IIRC it was an outlook problem more than a gmail problem.

Check this...

Google Groups

[Spoiler]

I run g-apps (not g-mail) for a couple of email accounts including my plan B and I'm not really familiar with the email address issue you are on about... if this only affects incoming mail why is it a problem? And is this specifically to do with what happens when forwarding the email?

It's an issue because it looks rubbish on emails (which are going to customers) and will probably confuse simple people!

This occurs when receiving an email from someone. It may be to do with the way I'm authenticating as the real user but the email address for that user is configured as the forwarder "mail@" address (so all mails are sent from "mail@")??

I'll check in both outlook and google mail to see if it's just an outlook issue.

[Spoiler]

Can you fix this with delegation? IIRC it was an outlook problem more than a gmail problem.

Check this...

Google Groups

I'll have a look, thanks, but having had a quick read, the issue mentioned is for sending mail out. Mine is for receiving mail. Maybe the fix is similar though.

[VectraMan]

I'll have a look, thanks, but having had a quick read, the issue mentioned is for sending mail out. Mine is for receiving mail. Maybe the fix is similar though.

If you're getting it on incoming email, then surely that's down to the sender?

I used to send my outgoing email to my ISP's SMTP server rather than GMail to avoid this. That was using Thunderbird at home, and it all synced and worked, except of course if you used the web interface or a phone when mobile, you got the "on behalf of" again.