Backing up OWA without a client
May 17, 2009 12:01 PM   Subscribe

I need to backup an Outlook Web Access account without any access to POP or SMTP. I have weak Google-Fu in this matter.

The obvious solution would be to configure a client and download them all. The district IT department, however, refuses to divulge IMAP and POP server names and threw a holy hellfit when someone got hold of them and tried to set up a client. It has been announced that they are dumping all of the accounts this summer and all of us should forward or print out anything important.

There has go to be a better way. Surely someone facing this problem before has come up with something.
posted by spartacusroosevelt to Technology (8 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
What version of Exchange is this? If it's Exchange 2003 or later, see if your department has instructions for "Outlook Anywhere." Get a copy of Outlook 2007 on a 60-day trial from Microsoft and set it up. Then, follow these instructions (they say they're for Outlook 2003, but the process is similar in 2007) to copy your data.
posted by fireoyster at 12:08 PM on May 17, 2009


Oh, as an aside: Your department may allow Outlook Anywhere because they deem it more secure than POP or IMAP which, if set up incorrectly, allow passwords to be sent in plain text or for other policy reasons. It may also be they don't know about it and simply haven't disabled it.
posted by fireoyster at 12:10 PM on May 17, 2009


Response by poster: Giving that a shot now, will report back.
posted by spartacusroosevelt at 12:12 PM on May 17, 2009


Alternatively, create a gmail account, forward everything to that account, and download them from gmail.
posted by blue_beetle at 12:27 PM on May 17, 2009


Response by poster: They apparently turned off Outlook Anywhere access.

I was going to forward them all to somewhere, but there are hundreds of messages (I keep all correspondence between myself, parents, students and administrators so something doesn't bit me in the butt later. I tried to set up a rule about forwarding everything, but don't seem to be able to apply it to everything already in the mailbox.
posted by spartacusroosevelt at 12:32 PM on May 17, 2009


I've been able to connect to OWA as a WebDAV share in XP. Should be copy/paste once you do that.
posted by ConstantineXVI at 12:53 PM on May 17, 2009 [1 favorite]


What Exchange version is this? In Exchange 2007 I can highlight all my messages on a given page all at once and forward them to an external account. There's probably a way to do this through Exchange's API with using just your credentials to download all your messages, but it would probably take longer than an hour of forwarding the messages by hand.

As I run the Exchange thing in our organization, I strongly suggest you do as they say and only keep what you need. I have very specific legal guidelines I have to maintain as far as record management and retention. It is all under the paradigm of keeping things for only as long as we are legally required to. If you ever been involved in a lawsuit you'll see what kind of problems creep up when people go around your organizations records management policy.

Of course it does sound to me like whoever is doing your Exchange migration is being more lazy than anything, or more likely they're underfunded and can't deal with migration costs.
posted by geoff. at 1:04 PM on May 17, 2009


I asked this in October - short answer is, have fun with Gmail.
posted by catlet at 4:26 PM on May 17, 2009


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