3.3.1 MAPI vs SMTP Mail

Before you can send mail, you need to decide which mail interface you will use. If your workstation is part of a large institutional local area network, more than likely, that decision has already been made for you. Many PC based institutional LANs use mail systems (such as Microsoft Mail, Windows for Workgroups Mail, Schedule Plus, etc.) that conform to Microsoft's Mail Application Programmers Interface (MAPI) Dynamic Link Library (DLL). Local mail systems make it convenient to exchange mail between your local work environment (with custom address books, global address books, lookup services, mailing list indexes etc.) but they don't always scale up when dealing with an extremely large distributed system such as the Internet. If you spend most of your time communicating with local users, you will probably want to stick with whatever mail system is used on your institutional LAN (such as MAPI) . If you spend most of your time communicating with people on the Internet, and you do not already have a robust SMTP based E-mail package, you probably want to start out using the simple SMTP interface built into WinVN.

WinVN Documentation created by Jim Dumoulin / NASA - Kennedy Space Center.

HyperTexted by Michael Downs / NASA - Kennedy Space Center.