Avoid pitfalls in Windows NT and Windows 95
In the real world, few people run Windows NT alone. With it, they run
Macintoshes, DOS, Windows 3.x, UNIX, and others, and need for these operating
systems to communicate with each other. Nowhere is that fact so evident as in
small businesses, which often have PCs running three or four versions of Windows
(3.1, Workgroups, 95, and NT) and don't have the money or management talents to
standardize. Such a business can have NT on its server and one or more NT
workstations or on a single workstation that doubles as a server.
Pity such a shop's poor systems administrator who's learning NT between
getting the everyday job done and dealing with screaming users. They want email
so they can communicate with each other and with the outside world. And the boss
doesn't want to spend any money.
So what can the harried systems administrator do? With nothing but what
Microsoft provides, you and your users can communicate inside your mixed
network. This substitute may not work as well as the expensive spread, but what
you have may be good enough. Just be aware of potential problems.
Free Internal Email
Ahh, email. How did we live without it?
Well, most people don't live without it. People often have two or three
personal addresses through America Online (AOL), CompuServe, and a local
Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Email provides an inexpensive, fast, and efficient way to conduct business.
However, many small companies don't have internal email or a corporate Internet
connection.
Internal email is a good first step toward connecting small companies to
the Internet. NT 3.51 comes with a mail system, MSMAIL32, that is functionally
identical to the mail client in Windows 3.11. Be warned: MSMAIL32 is
cantankerous, crotchety, and high maintenance. It's not well documented, either
online or in the big Administering NT books. MSMAIL32 is not secure: The
data files live in a shared directory that anyone can mess with. (MSMAIL32 does
offer simple encryption, but no protection against someone, say, deleting all
the mail files.) But the price is right, and as a step toward getting your
company on the Net, MSMAIL32 can do the job.
Setting up MSMAIL in NT 3.51 isn't hard, but you'll run into enough
pitfalls that working through the prescribed steps is worthwhile. The first step
is to log in to your NT server and find MSMAIL; by default, it's in the Main
group. Run the MSMAIL program, and create your post office on a machine that
remains on your server, for example. Put the post office in a directory you plan
to share, a top-level directory (e.g., d:\wgpo) to avoid confusion. Then use the
Administration function to create accounts that include the names of the users,
their account names, and their passwords. Nope. Sorry. You can't copy accounts
from the NT user list; you have to administer mail accounts separately. (In such
management matters, NetWare Directory Services--NDS--still has it all over NT:
NDS allows centralized management of most network functions, which saves time,
and has only one tree of usernames, which NDS-savvy programs such as GroupWise
can access.)
Be careful when you choose passwords. MSMAIL's rules are different from
NT's. MSMAIL considers characters such as apostrophes illegal in passwords, but
these characters are fine in NT passwords. This difference means that MSMAIL's
administrator will let you type won'ttell as a password but will
silently throw out the apostrophe. Then when you try to enter the password you
typed, instead of ignoring the apostrophe, MSMAIL will reject it. And because
you can't see what a password is--only type in a new one--you end up starting
over in frustration. This misfeature perplexed me for an hour.
This password caveat goes double for the administrator's password. You have
to be utterly sure you keep it in mind or on paper--as with NT, an MSMAIL
password appears as asterisks. If you forget it, you can't retrieve it--yep, I
forgot the admin password. Worse, MSMAIL gives you no easy way to nuke the
existing post office directory and start over. I'm not sure where the pointer to
the directory lives, and I can't find anybody who knows. It's not in an .ini
file, and it doesn't seem to be in the Registry. I finally started over by
deleting everything that seemed connected to MSMAIL and restarting the computer.