Email auto-login

[waldo]

Hi,

Firstly, just to precede my question - I realise this isn't the most secure idea in the world (and I have done my best to persuade my client against this, to no avail...)

Dealing with a client whose staff are not the most techy minded. Furthermore, they're all sales who don't have the time nor energy to invest in learning new things (like IT skills and using email!) Client has asked that each sales member has a simple link to click on their (Windows) desktop which will automatically open up their email address.

I've seen similar things done with cPanel before, anyone aware of how such a thing could be achieved with email? By email, this can either refer to the standard email packages (Horde or Squirrelmail, preferably the latter) or a custom email package which is to follow?

Hope that makes sense, thanks for reading.


Cheers,
andy

[easyr]

What about installing Thunderbird or even using Outlook Express (shudder) or the new Windows Live mail client? Or does it have to be web-based?

[Aussie Bob]

I'm not aware of there being a url that could contain a webmail's username and password. Steve might be aware of one, and you could try experimenting with urls. Search over on the cpanel forum and see if someone has come up with a direct access webmail url.

[foobic]

I just tried using the old http://username:password@example.com/page format (which still works on Firefox after a popup warning) but it seems to confuse CPanel's authentication system - not recommended!

You can set up the browser to remember a username / password but I think it's limited to one per domain. Presumably you'll need more than one user per office PC? To get around that you might try using http://username@example.com (again Firefox only?) or perhaps setup a subdomain for each user and use http://username.example.com.

HTH

[Dotable Steve]

You could probably do it with java script (write your own custom html page that they can click on their desktop) but not really recommended.

Using a user/password is a pretty standard function, as has been mentioned, browsers can remember the details, I'm assuming they could login once. And why not just use an email client, it's much better to work with than webmail.

[waldo]

Unfortunately, it has to be Webmail for a variety of reasons. I also don't want to depend on browsers saving log-on details as, at present, there may be a number of users using the same workstation (and I don't want to get embroiled in the companies IT setup...)

Will have a wee search on the CPanel forums and see if that brings up any results... Thanks for the ideas so far

[waldo]

I found this after a quick search on Cpanel forums:
http://www.cpanel.net/cpanel-login.phps

I reckon I should be able to write something locally which will link in with this

Thanks again!