I had ur email but I deleted it

October 9, 2008 8:38 AM

I work remotely 100%. I am required to use Outlook Web Access for my corporate email. Is there any way to archive emails to my desktop?

There are elements of our IT policy that I cannot control: Outlook desktop is disabled on my work laptop because we do not have VPN access into the home office servers. We have recently been given stringent mailbox size quotas. The "over limit" message tells us to use the Outlook desktop archive tool, which isn't available in OWA. No POP or IMAP access. My workaround is to forward messages I need to retain to my gmail account.

Is OWA really this featureless or are we just missing something? Is there anything I can do to automate this, more or less?

posted by catlet to technology (12 comments total)

Well, I believe you are out of lock with OWA.

There is a rough trade-off between usefulness and security in any network. Looks like you've got the short end of the usefulness bit. Are there many (any) other fully remote workers? Somebody needs to go to bat for you with IT and get some concessions out of them.

They can give remote users unlimited quotas in the short term, and enable RPC over HTTPS or VPN access (or even POP3/IMAP over SSL) in the long term. There is nothing about this that isn't doable with reasonable security.
posted by rocketpup at 8:55 AM on October 9, 2008

Well, I believe you are out of lock with OWA.

That would be 'luck'.
posted by rocketpup at 8:56 AM on October 9, 2008

I believe that what you are doing (forwarding messages) is pretty much all you can do. Maybe you can get someone in IT set up a forwarding rule/filter in Exchange that just forwards everything, but that's kinda it.
posted by kalessin at 9:00 AM on October 9, 2008

I just checked OWA and I don't even see a way to auto blind copy an address on all your emails, which was going to be my suggestion. I think you need to work through your boss and get him to understand that the draconian security policy is hampering your ability to do the job they pay you to do.
posted by COD at 9:07 AM on October 9, 2008

My workaround is to forward messages I need to retain to my gmail account.

Just a cautionary note, if one of the purposes of IT's restrictive email setup is to prevent the entire inner workings of the company for the last bazillion years being examined by hostile eyes and used against the company in the case of any kind of lawsuit, this workaround exposes your personal email to subpoena and hostile examination. For that and other reasons, if you're not already doing it, forward to an email address that you don't use for anything other than work. And if you plan on running for VP... make it a secure one :-)
posted by -harlequin- at 9:32 AM on October 9, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

If they have web access turned on you should be able to hit it from a mail client. You would have to have your own personal Mac or PC to do this.

In Entourage (Mac) all you have to do is put in your domain settings in the "Exchange" field.

https://url.you-use-to-get-to-OWA.com/exchange/[e-mail]

If it has web services turned on, this should work.

Not sure if it will violate any of your work policies. I don't know if you can do this with Outlook, but would think it would work.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:46 AM on October 9, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I'd talk to your manager and list business reasons you need access to old emails (I know I'm accessing my email archives all the time).

Can you ask a tech to create you a .pst file of your folders so you can have archived email in outlook but receive new mail in OWA for the time being? There may be a third-party add-on that let's you use a .pst file in OWA. Don't risk having email off company servers.
posted by ejaned8 at 9:53 AM on October 9, 2008

Actually, cjorgensen is correct about Mac Entourage using OWA for Exchange access. That could work.

Unfortunately for Outlook you really do need RPC over HTTPS for equivalent access.
posted by rocketpup at 9:53 AM on October 9, 2008

You could use Evolution, it also goes over OWA for Exchange and has windows builds.
posted by Tobu at 10:17 AM on October 9, 2008

@ -harlequin- - You are correct that legal exposure and retention policies would be the normal reason for such a configuration. That's not the reason in this case. Currently I'm only forwarding stuff that's non-client and basically innocuous - anything that would fall under a normal retention policy stays on the server and I live with the over-limit messages.

Thanks, all, for confirming what I'd suspected. My work laptop is XP so I will give Evolution a try; I have a Mac as well so I can give Entourage a try (not sure what our current Web Services config is although expect that it's not enabled).
posted by catlet at 10:56 AM on October 9, 2008

As long as your company is running at least Exchange 2003, there is absolutely no technical reason IT can't enable RPC over HTTPS. RPC over HTTPS is essentially a method to route Outlook's communication with the Exchange server securely over the Internet. This lets everyone use a real desktop e-mail client, requires no additional software on any of the remote PCs and is absolutely as secure as a VPN. It can be used with a self-signed SSL certificate, which is free. (A self-signed cert isn't the best way to go about it, but can be done).

Beware of Entourage. I've seen it consistently lose calendar entries when connecting to Exchange and wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing happen with e-mail. Bottom line: You have a legitimate business problem and your IT department has the means to solve it, so that's what should happen.
posted by cnc at 1:01 PM on October 9, 2008

Seconding avoiding entourage and evolution if you can. Too many little problems. Does your company use Office, if so then you have Outlook. You should tell them that you dont want to use webmail anymore and that its not appropriate for professionals.
posted by damn dirty ape at 1:54 PM on October 9, 2008