Aim: The aim was to give every pupil in the school and all the members of staff an e-mail account. It was also necessary to create e-mail accounts for various purposes - guest accounts, Year Groups, particular projects and people. This all had to be done on a single dial up phone line

Software Required: The software that we eventually settled on has two parts:

• The e-mail package which we use is Pegasus. This was chosen over Microsoft Mail and Eudora because of the security which it allowed us to implement.

• The SMTP Daemon we use is SLMail. This was chosen as it was the only available package we could find.

• A gateway was required and we use Dave Mansel's Winsmtp gateway which is freeware.

There were of course time implications, and it has taken a lot of time to get it up and running to a degree where the pupils can send e-mail.

Technical Details

The school runs RM NetLM 2.0 on a server with a 2 GB hard drive. We have forty machines - 486 SX 25's/ 33's/ 50's with between 4 and 8 MB of RAM. Very few have Hard Drives and this was a factor.

The overall concept of the system is fairly simple. The traditional e-mail diagram of:

has been changed into :

This addition of the server as a mail box is what makes our system work.

The pupils use Pegasus to write a message. This is then sent to the hard disk until we connect to the internet. SLmail is then run. The SMTP server (at Abingdon - run by RM) then passes any queued messages to SLmail and receives the mail from SLmail. The SMTP Server will deliver the mail and SLmail will pass the mail into the user mailboxes on our server. When the user logs into the system the mail is there for them to read. Sounds Simple. :-)

The Really Technical Bits

A desktop was created and attached to a group called Internet. The pupils could go into this group and had access to the e-mail icon. It was decided not to put the e-mail icon on the standard desktop as by forcing the pupils to log on and log off it would prevent them from using it during lessons times.

A share was set up on the server and all users had read and write access to it. This allowed them to read their mail from it and write their outgoing mail to it. SLmail also had access to the share and could pick up the outgoing mail and send it to RM and receive the mail and deliver it our end. Internal mail is routed directly without using the external server.

Within Pegasus (the mail package) we set up user accounts for all the users on the school network. After the user logged on and used Pegasus they were asked for their user ID. This caused problems as it meant that they could access other peoples accounts.

Instead, we set up their usernames on the e-mail system to be the same as their username to log onto RM NetLm.

There is a command line function that you can use with Pegasus so that when you run it, you can pass a username as a parameter and it will stop the user from entering any user account name.

We wrote an MTSL which runs Pegasus and picks up their username from an environment variable. This then logs them on to their own account and they cannot get into anybody elses.

Once the access to Pegasus had been established, it was necessary to set up SLmail.

RM technical support gave the school a Static IP address which is necessary and then set it up on their server so that instead of our address being: Highsted@.Rmplc.Co.Uk we became: Anyname@Highsted.Rmplc.Co.Uk

Providing we then set up the username in Pegasus and Slmail we could have as many users as we liked. Any mail delivered to the RM server was passed to us to sort out the username.

We entered the Daily Telegraph competition and were one one the winners. Our prize was an ISDN line and a years subscription. This meant that we had to change our system slightly as we now had the mail server at school.