How to pull ALL emails from a Microsoft Exchange server into your preferred mailbox.

Our university, like many other organisations, runs Microsoft's Exchange server, which, I've discovered over the last few months has a few rather annoying quirks.

One of these quirks is the inability to get it to forward all inbound emails to an alternative mailbox - something I'd like to do. It does have two options which appear to do this, though one of them actually wraps the original email up as an attachment in a forwarded message (ugh) and the other only forwards some of the emails. Yes that's right, only those which go through the external mail hub, or something, so I'm told by the University's support people. Those sent by one Exchange user to another don't get forwarded.

This is rather annoying if you rely on email, and more so if you very infrequently receive emails at all on that address, so as to not make regular checking something you do.

Anyway, today I discovered that our University Exchange is able to mimic a POP3 server (over SSL) at least! So, I am able to set up a POP link from my preferred account to pull in the messages for itself. If you're also at the University of Birmingham, here are the settings you'll need:


Server: owa1.adf.bham.ac.uk
Port: 995 (this is the SSL port I think. TLS also appeared to work)

The username and password are obviously the Exchange ones.

Now, hopefully I won't miss any more emails...

Comments

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by Zoran - 24 Jul 2009 - 05:47

Another alternative is to set up a mail filter (such as it is) on Exchange. Use IE to log on to the uni's web-based email and add a 'Rule' which matches all email and simply forwards it to your preferred email account. Since this rule works on your inbox, ALL your mail will actually get forwarded including the ones sent by internal Exchange users. I was bitten by this some months ago.

by Vivek - 31 Jul 2009 - 14:20

Hi Vivek,

Yeah this is now an option too. I originally wrote this post before exchange added these features. It's worth noting though, that you need to add a rule to "redirect" rather than just "forward" your mail, since otherwise, IIRC, it wraps them in another message for forwarding.

Cheers,

Pete.

by Pete Lewis - 31 Jul 2009 - 19:38

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