Webmail?

Peerzy · 8 Jan 2010 at 11:35

This is a bit of a weird one as its my boss who is asking.

Basically I work in a school which has taken on a new VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) called Frog. It's got some cruddy web mail that won't let us do lots of things like automatically have emails forwarded, it's slow, buggy and not a scratch on what we use to use (RM Easymail) apparently.

We can't go back to RM Easymail, and the school has made a financially commitment to Frog, it's brilliant for other stuff just the email side of things is rubbish.

My boss is on the phone with the Frog team and is hopefully getting them to snap into work and try and sort it out but it's going to take months/years.

A select few users are wondering if there is anything we can do. We cannot go and buy an exchange server as the VLE Frog is already running off it's own server.

It uses IMAP and so we've been able to hook it up to Outlook/Thunderbird but this is hard when people are not allocated machines, they simply turn up and login. This means only users personal office PC's or laptops can have this setup.

I'm wondering if there is a web alternative that can be used, we type in the server details and it would allow us to do everything we needed and be much quicker/easier.

Basically an advanced version of Web2Mail or something like that, we are willing to pay a small fee to do this so it doesn't have to be a free solution.

I'm not really too sure where to go as email/servers are not really my thing, any ideas you guys have?

Thanks

mr.sly · 8 Jan 2010 at 11:39

Google Apps might be what you're looking for.

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/index.html

DJ Prem · 8 Jan 2010 at 11:46

mr.sly said:
Google Apps might be what you're looking for.

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/edu/index.html

Second that

Peerzy · 8 Jan 2010 at 11:52

Thanks, I've passed the link on.

However they specifically don't want to replace Frog as apparently getting the users to login to the system everyday to check emails (and then they check the other parts of the Frog system) is something we want to encourage.

As far as I can tell this will be a small scale solution only for a few users for a while. Google Apps seems to be an entire package that would effectivly replace Frog, or am I missing a part when I can just use the web client?

mr.sly · 8 Jan 2010 at 14:07

Peerzy said:
Thanks, I've passed the link on.

However they specifically don't want to replace Frog as apparently getting the users to login to the system everyday to check emails (and then they check the other parts of the Frog system) is something we want to encourage.

As far as I can tell this will be a small scale solution only for a few users for a while. Google Apps seems to be an entire package that would effectivly replace Frog, or am I missing a part when I can just use the web client?

I imagine they would need two separate logins. I'm not sure you can integrate Google Apps with other programs.

Google Apps just asks you to change your CNAME record for your domain, then you login in to 'mail.yourschool.ac.uk' with your email username ([email protected]). Then that loads of the usual Gmail interface.

I don't know how Frog works so I can't recommended a solution to go about integrating the two if that's even possible.

Peerzy · 12 Jan 2010 at 14:48

Her reply to Google Apps suggestion:

Boss said:
Hummm.... this seems complicated!!!
Any luck with an online one that you can just purchase one user??

Anyone know of one of these online things we could purchase?

daz · 12 Jan 2010 at 15:15

It sounds like Frog is an entirely integrated environment of mail server, webmail and all the other gubbins.

Most web mail clients (unless package with a mail server, or modified in some way) won't have features for forwarding email, spam filtering and the like since this kind of functionality heavily depends on the back end mail server. So using something like Roundcube won't work because it is only effectively a web based IMAP client - it can't do any forwarding because for that it needs to know about your mail server configuration.

I think you may be stuck, unless you can integrate Frog with another mailserver/webmail package - e.g. Atmail (Atmail.com) or Smartermail.