Greetings. I find myself supporting a friend who has an IMac. My last
session on this machine was my first on a Mac. I support VMS and UX
servers, and have plenty of MSWin experience, but no Mac (yet).

The machine is an IMac running MacOS9. It has a DSL connection,
and most everything works. The Outlook mail client get_message works,
but send_message fails due to some authentication error. SBC DSL help
lists mail client 5.0+ for Outlook, and this system has Outlook/MSIE
4.5.
I suspect I need to upgrade.

My question is this: can I simply download Outlook/MSIE 5.x from
the net, and install it on top of 4.5? What is the install overview for
a
Mac?

Thank you so much, lbalders[at]gte.net

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 10:19:35 -0700, lbalders[at]gte.net wrote
(in message <3F86E9F7.2036FC66[at]gte.net>):

> Greetings. I find myself supporting a friend who has an IMac. My last
> session on this machine was my first on a Mac. I support VMS and UX
> servers, and have plenty of MSWin experience, but no Mac (yet).
>
> The machine is an IMac running MacOS9. It has a DSL connection,
> and most everything works. The Outlook mail client get_message works,
> but send_message fails due to some authentication error. SBC DSL help
> lists mail client 5.0+ for Outlook, and this system has Outlook/MSIE
> 4.5.
> I suspect I need to upgrade.
>
> My question is this: can I simply download Outlook/MSIE 5.x from
> the net, and install it on top of 4.5? What is the install overview for
> a
> Mac?
>
> Thank you so much, lbalders[at]gte.net
>

You can certainly try upgrading, but I would be looking at the smtp settings
for the email client. If you do upgrade, the SOP is to download the updater,
then set your Extensions Manager set to OS 9.x.x Base or All. To do this you
go to the Apple Menu in the upper left corner, then look for the Control
Panels folder, and in there look for Extensions Manager. This control panel
lets you set groups of extensions on or off, or select/deselect individual
extensions. There should be a pull down menu at/near the top of this control
panel window. One of the choices should be Mac OS 9.x.x Base. Selecting this
and restarting makes the computer start up in a minimal configuration,
somewhat similar to Safe Mode. Run the installer, either as an Easy Install,
or Custom Install if this is an option and you want to muck with choosing
what pieces get installed. If you are not sure, do an Easy Install.

Once you have successfully run the installer, you will want to reset the
Extensions Manager control panel back to what it was and restart the computer
for all changes to take effect.

Generally installers do one of two things. Either overwrite the existing app
with the new version, keeping all settings intact, or do a separate install.
In either case, you should not need to do much to get things to work. Macs do
not like duplicate versions of the same program on the machine at the same
time, but there should be no problem with having two different versions, one
old and one new other than taking up HD space.

Steve