Upgrading Evolution/Express/Mac-equivalent

[Preston Hagar]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 12:28 PM, Piper<pay_the_piper at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Why wouldn't Evolution or Express be improved or upgraded? And what does the
> Mac OS call its emailer?
>
> So these are three email servers allowed by Shaw and other ISPs.
>
> If they are improved Shaw won't allow them? Is that political?


Evolution and Outlook Express are _not_ email servers.  They are MUAs
or "Mail Clients".  This diagram may help:

http://support.kavi.com/khelp/kmlm/user_help/html/how_email_works.html

Evolution and Outlook Express, on their own, cannot send or receive
email.  They only talk to a email server or MTA.  For most people,
this is commonly their ISPs email server (in your case Shaw's).  Since
Shaw owns and administers their email server, they can setup whatever
rules they like (no more than X number of emails sent at a time, or
per day.  No attachments bigger than X MB, etc.).  In reality, Shaw
will likely "allow" just about any mail client that complies to their
Terms of Service (some examples might be Mozilla Thunderbird,
Microsoft Outlook, Kmail, etc.)  they likely only provide setup
instructions and basic support on how to connect to their email server
for Evolution and/or Outlook Express.

No residential Internet connection that I have ever heard of allows
running a server of any type from it.  You may be able to run it or
work around their "blocks", but it is pretty much always against their
Terms of Service (which I believe an earlier poster has pointed out).
If you really want to run a mailing list server and don't want to run
it on anyone else's equipment (for fear that they may disconnect you
or something), then you best bet would likely be to go to a local
computer consultant (hopefully one that supports Linux), have them
help you install mailing list software like mailman and/or majordomo,
and then either get a "business class"  Internet connection or
collocate the server somewhere.

Please understand, trying to turn Evolution into a MTA/mailing list
server would be like trying to make a car fly when you have a plane
sitting right next to you.  Evolution only presents a nice way to
read/send email from a email server.  It is not an email server
itself.  In direct answer to your question of:

> If they are improved Shaw won't allow them? Is that political?

Although I do not speak for Shaw, I can probably give a good idea of
their policies.  Shaw, likely, doesn't care what software you use or
what it is named.  It only cares what that software does.  It is fine
with you running email clients (Evolution, Outlook Express), as long
as you stay within their rules.  Shaw does not want you running a
server of any type on your residential connection.  This is not
political.  As I said before, I have never seen any residential
Internet service that allowed a server of any type.  They always want
to you get their "business class" service or to not host servers on
their network at all.  If a program, say Evolution was "improved" as
you suggest to act as a server, rather than just a client, then they
would likely take issue with it.  It is no different than if I somehow
"improved" Solitaire (the game) to somehow cause DDoS attacks.  They
don't care if I play Solitaire on my computer, even if I do it all
day.  They would only care if my "improved Solitaire" began affecting
their network.  In all, they could care less what software you run on
your computer, or what it is called.  They only care how it
affects/utilizes the Internet connection they provide you.

Hopefully this will clear things up, but possibly it won't.  I just
thought I would give it a try.

Preston