Open Office Advice

[Daisy]

Hi all

 

I was wondering whether some of you with knowledge of open office would be able to help me.

 

I am working for a small non-profit at the moment, and they need a better method of accessing their emails.

 

On my laptop I have Outlook that I have used for the first time to access their emails. However they don't have the software, and anyway I quite like the idea of supporting things that have an open copyright or whatever particular one they use.

 

Does Open Office have an email system that I can download for them?

 

Also I need to change their email system, because at the moment they are using Hotmail, and frankly it does not meet their needs at all, especially since the amount of contacts they are receiving is through the roof at the moment. Is there any in particular that you can recommend. The same for mailing list software, and Discuss lists.

 

I know of two that are used by groups that I am apart of, and at the moment I have set up a free account with MailChimp for them, but I think we are likely to meet the free capacity very soon, so an alternative needs to be found.

 

http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html

http://riseup.net/

 

If you guys know of other things that maybe useful I'd very much appreciate the help.

 

 

Thanks

 

Celia

[Drewbie]

I looked on open office's site I don't' think it has a email system, try http://www.mozillamessaging.com thunderbird it's by mozilla.

[Hoskins]

In setting up small companies (or people with no money, ie non-profits), I usually recommend they do these things:

 

(1) Open Office for the typical office suite functions

(2) Firefox for browsing

(3) Thunderbird for email - Link!

(4) Googlemail for an email provider, setting up Thunderbird to use Googlemail as its provider as an IMAP account - www.googlemail.com (this is gmail in the US). If everyone is using this, it makes it very easy to share calendars and use them over the web. www.googlemail.com

(5) Google calendar for sharing calendars, although Mozilla Sunbird/Lightning isn't bad, it's not the best either

(6) Google Docs for collaborating on documents

(7) Dropbox.com for sharing files

(8) Mozy for backing up files, if they can afford to pay, then Carbonite.

 

All of these services are free, except for Carbonite and Google Apps for domain hosting.

[MikeL]

I've been using SeaMonkey, an integrated browser/e-mail program which works very well. It is a Mozilla-based product available free at http://www.seamonkey-project.org/.

 

I can also recommend the Firefox browser.

[Former Member]

I would also recommend Thunderbird for E-Mail. If you want an integrated calendar (like you have with Outlook) you need to install the add-on Lightning for Thunderbird.

 

Tob

[Rilbur]

I'll chime in with my support with thunderbird, though google mail has it's own quirks you should be aware of. (The only one that's ever caused me problem is it's non-standard implementation of pop3: rather than letting the pop3 client decide if e-mails get deleted from server or not, you use the web-settings to do it, with the result that you can't have a mobile device to check the mail and then have your computer be the only one deleting it from server).

[MikeL]

I would also recommend Thunderbird for E-Mail. If you want an integrated calendar (like you have with Outlook) you need to install the add-on Lightning for Thunderbird.

 

Tob

Lightning also works well with SeaMonkey, giving you browser, e-mail, and calendar all in one.

Edited April 24, 2010 by MikeL