Background:
I have a home network with 4 PC's. We have five people in the household - each with their own e-mail account, and an additional one I keep for subscriptions (mostly spam). I recently purchased an HP NAS server which has worked great for sharing media files and personal documents (it also works as a print server - great device!). We have the newest version of Outlook (2007) as our PC's are new.

Problem:
The problem focuses around Outlook and our e-mail which seems to be hard to access. If I am on my laptop, I can only check 'new' messages via web-mail. Once it's downloaded into Outlook and 'cleaned' off of the mail server, I can no longer view my messages. I was wondering if there was a way to keep the Outlook 'datafile' on the NAS server and use Outlook as a 'client' to view the datafile. Wouldn't this allow me to access my Outlook via the laptop or the PC? I asked Microsoft support and they told me to purchase Exchange which I think is much more than we need for our 5 home users (all family members).

Does anybody have any thoughts on how I might be able to have a mini exchange server or 'Outlook server'? I appreciate any thoughts and/or advice!

Inside of Outlook go to your account properties and click on more settings. Go to the last tab, advanced, and select leave a copy of messages on server. It will not work like IMAP. But you will still have all your messages on your laptop and the mail server.

Thanks - but there is still a problem with synchronizing contacts. The other issue is that it's harder to manage the e-mail. 2 Copies of each message means that you have to do twice the work keeping them organized. This probably isn't an issue if it were just me, but with all of us sharing the laptop, it makes it much harder to manage 2 copies of each message. Isn't there another way to do this? I would think we wouldn't be the only family struggling with this, and with the proliferation of NAS Servers on the market, you'd think it would be something that Microsoft is at least thinking about...

What e-mail server(s)/accounts are you using now? Also, do you have to use Outlook?

Scalix is a nice (free) mail/calendar/contact server sute that works seamlessly with Outlook. Needs Linux of course

I suppose I don't have to use Outlook... What would be my options? My only concern would be that as my wife is a physician and I work as a conusltant, we both synchronize various devices (phones, PDA, etc.) with our PC. It seems all integrated with Outlook right now, and am afraid to 'break' it. we're currently using POP3 servers and gmail for e-mail.

Outlook is nice as it's one aggregation of Email/Contacts/Calendar services.
There are others that perform that function as well
1) SaleSmartz Pro is Mac/Windows compatible AND provides a webbased solution as well.
(no I'm not associated with Salesmartz; we just use it for my wife's work).

2) it is possible to sync the Outlook.PST files back and forth across systems,
but you're exposed to two users conflicting at the same time, both physically
moving at the same time, or worse, logically creating conflicts by
a) userA copies master to remote, starts modifications
b) userB moves remote modified copy back to master
c) userA returns modifications much later (ie end-of-day)
and thus overwrites userB's modifications.

Exporting separate Calendars & Contacts pst files reduces the exposure
but does not eliminated it.