[Momma]

Hi All,

I will be working from home soon, but i need access to two email accounts, my personal account and an artwork account, i have been told by out IT department that i will have to check both by logging into our internal server via webmail, as they don't allow any external email clients because it means leaving a port open, which is a security risk. Is there any way around this? I'm thinking of something like a notifier that can let me know when there is new email, i need some way of being notified, instead of logging on to two separate email accounts every 5 minutes, the IT guys say that because of cookies and open sessions, its best it i open my personal mail in say safari and leave it open, and then the artwork email in firefox and leave that open all day, and just refresh when i check for new mail? Surely there must be another way around it? The company uses Microsoft Exchange Server and i have to log into the Microsoft Office Outlook Web access page to view emails.

Two questions...

1) Is there any way i can use an email client such as mail.app or entourage etc if the IT company blocks all ports? Can i not use the port that i access the webmail on?

2) Will any of these plugins work with Microsoft Exchange web mail? Or do you know any alternatives?
http://www.hawkwings.net/plugins.htm

Any help is much appreciated

Cheers

[besson3c]

The only ways you could get your email via an external client are if your IT staff enables IMAP and opens up access to this port, connecting to your company VPN, or if you can find some way to script an HTTP session to Outlook Web Access.

Our Exchange servers do have secure IMAP enabled (IMAP over SSL) and we also provide secure authentication to SMTP via TLS/SSL as well. This is the way to offer this service securely for external (and internal) IMAP clients.

You might want to check to see if your company provides a virtual private network (VPN). If so, you should be able to connect to your VPN to allow yourself to access Exchange from an external mail client.

Otherwise, I wouldn't even bother scripting OWA, I'm sure it is quite complicated, particularly because it would likely require a Javascript interpreter in addition to scripting of a HTTP session.