Briefly:
The older Netscape 4.7x email client has the ability to respond to
an Event Request (i.e. meeting invitation) sent by Outlook users. I
want to know what other options are available to a Windows 2000 user,
who is using some more recent email client but excluding the Outlook
family of email clients, that would still fully allow for some way to
respond to such invitations.
NOTE: For the purpose of providing an answer, it is not necessary
for the answerer to verify that the alternatives work on Windows 2000,
only that it is reasonble to believe from description/documentation
that they are available and should work for Windows 2000. For example,
"Move to Linux/Mac/???" is not a valid option.
More Details:
These invitations/Event Requests come as an email message. When
Netscape 4.7x receives such a message, one sees a nicely formatted
(html) table with entries for What When Organizer Who, plus a text
entry field for "Comments (optional):" and functional buttons to
either Accept, Decline, "Delegate to", or get "More Details..." (and
within that also a Tentative button).
When I use other more recent non-Outlook Windows email clients,
even with JavaScript turned on for email, the very same message will
appear only as ugly text in the form
BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook 10.0 MIMEDIR//EN
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:REQUEST
BEGIN:VEVENT
ATTENDEE;CN="...";ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;RSVP=TRUE:MAILTO:...
ATTENDEE;CN="...";ROLE=REQ-PARTICIPANT;RSVP=TRUE:MAILTO:...
ORGANIZER:MAILTO:...
DTSTART:...
DTEND:...
TRANSP:OPAQUE
SEQUENCE:0
UID:...
DTSTAMP:...
DESCRIPTION:When: ...
SUMMARY:...
PRIORITY:...
CLASS:PUBLIC
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR
Valid strategies that would satisfy this request are not required
to be full Microsoft Exchange clients (although that is certainly not
excluded!). The ability to send out such invitations would be a
very desirable bonus, but is not required to be one of the valid
alternatives.
*** The minimum requirement is to be able to have a way to respond
to such invitations with functionality similar to the Netscape 4.7x
email client. ***
That method is not even limited to doing it through the email
client itself. For example, I have tried (without success) forwarding
such a message to a web based email service, including hotmail and
yahoo, to see if they would do any better. Saving the message to be
read by another tool might be another possibility. Other
possibilities might be plug-ins or add-ons to email clients that would
restore this capability.
Obviously I would prefer a no cost or else low cost solution (e.g.
one compatible with using one of the Mozilla email clients), but I
would be interested to know about any and all solutions that allow me
to receive my mail on Windows 2000 with an email client other than
Outlook/Outlook Express.
Valid strategies do not involve having changes made at the server
or requiring the sender to change what they are doing or how they are
sending the event requests/invitations. It must be implementable
independently by the recipient user.
A supported email client is clearly preferable to one that is now
defunct (e.g. Mozilla over Netscape), but even solutions that are no
longer being developed could qualify as a valid alternative and should
not be excluded from the list.
If a method does not use a Netscape/Mozilla email client, a
desirable quality that is not a requirement is that there is some way
to import mail and addresses from Netscape/Mozilla email clients when
converting to the new email client.
In short, the goal is to retain equivalence to continuing to use
Netscape 4.7x, but also allow a more recent non-Outlook email client
on Windows 2000.
Although there is the possibility that I have simply missed a vital
setting, I have tried without success Netscape 7.0, 7.1, Mozilla 1.6,
a version of Eudora, a version of Opera, and forwarding to web mail
(see above). Where it was a choice, I believe I had Javascript turned
on as much as possible for email. |
