Help needed with a tricky email situation.

Discussion in 'Software' started by nugget, Mar 28, 2008.

  1. nugget
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    nugget Junior toady

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    I hope that someone can help me here.

    I have a user that is leaving for 6 months. He needs to stay in touch using a company email address. What he wants to do is give control to someone else for his email account so she can delete the junk, answer the ones she can and forward the ones that are important. So far so good. What he also wants is a second email account that he can send and receive with on his laptop and also his mobile.

    We are using exchange 2007 and we use the format at the moment of [email protected]

    As we cannot use more than one exchange account, my thoughts were to delegate control of the users account to the second user. Then disassociate the email account from the leaving users user account. Create a pop account somewhere on an ISP. Configure his mobile device to check this pop account and not the exchange account. Get the second user to forward any mails to the pop account.

    Does this sound okay or just plain crazy?

    BTW I need to get this set up today. To add another twist the user will be connecting via VPN at times and I have set up a mobile UMTS/GPRS/WLAN/HSPDA card for him too. Another problem I'm having is connecting the vpn through the card.
     
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  2. hbroomhall

    hbroomhall Petabyte Poster Gold Member

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    Can you not use the web-mail access to Exchange, rather than involve an ISP? This is how we do remote email.

    And as this is a one-off what is wrong with a username like firstname.lastname.travelling?

    Harry.
     
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  3. BosonMichael
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    BosonMichael Yottabyte Poster

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    That's what I was going to suggest as well.
     
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  4. nugget
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    nugget Junior toady

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    Thanks Harry. The problem is that it needs to appear that he is here. That's why someone else needs to do his email through a "back way". No-one should know that he's gone. He also won't have too much access to the internet.

    He also gets around 150 mails per day (about half of which go unread).

    2nd edit: we also have webmail set up that he could access it but as he has limited chances for a connection he will be mostly using his pda to at least get the forwarded (not too many) mails and the laptop to write back when he has a connection.
     
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  5. hbroomhall

    hbroomhall Petabyte Poster Gold Member

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    Won't have too much access? Where is he going? The moon?

    These days either WiFi or Internet cafes are everywhere.

    I'm even typing this on a train (on my way to Newcastle!).

    And if he never bothers to read email I wonder why you are bothering. Presumably he is a PHB plus!

    Harry.
     
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  6. onoski

    onoski Terabyte Poster

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    Have you taken into account the possibility of the e-mails being forwarded to him etc?
     
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  7. Sparky
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    Sparky Zettabyte Poster Moderator

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    Is using activesync with the PDA an option?
     
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  8. Bluerinse
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    Bluerinse Exabyte Poster

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    why not just let the temp user log in with his credentials while he is away, remove him from any unnecessary sensitive groups and the temp to all intents and purposes will be him for the duration. You can change his password and re add the groups he was in on his return. The temp can then easily forward any needed emails to his mobile POP3 account.
     
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  9. nugget
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    nugget Junior toady

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    Thanks Harry. Where is he going? Not too sure really but I did hear mention of Syria and his final destination is India. He'l also be going by car and also by bicycle and I also heard that he will be doing some sailing and kayaking too. As for being a PHB, he is and he isn't. He has a very important PHB position but is a nice guy and not a typical PHB person. He is also rather chaotic which is why he doesn't read most of the mails.

    He has the pda set up to use activesync and it works quite well. The problem is that due to his volume of mail the cost of using it with his exchange account will be astronomical when he's out of the country. To put it into perspective I moved all hi mails to an archive 2 weeks ago (nearly 2GB worth) and now he has another 1500 mails in the inbox. He also doesn't delete anything either, just leaves them unread in the inbox.:dry


    So the solution that I've come up with is I moved all his mails to the archive so he has local access to them and then removed his account from outlook on the laptop. I then set him up with a pop account. The assistant has access to his inbox and will sort (and hopefully delete) the mail and forward him the important mail to the pop account. I will also configure his pda to sync with the pop account and not the exchange account.

    I have also set him up with a mobile unlimited pc card that has UMTS/GPRS/WLAN/HSPDA capabilities so he should be able to connect to a network somewhere. I'm just having a little problem setting up the VPN through the card but I should have it sorted today. Then he should be able to access the data that he might need.

    I think that he won't be using his laptop much so in that respect there shouldn't be too many problems. I also suspect that where he's going there isn't such a great network coverage either. Once it leaves Switzerland I can't gaurantee anything. Knowing how chaotic this guy is and also where he's going I don't think the laptop will live to see the whole 6 months and if it dies in between time then çest la vie. I can see me telling my boss "It was working perfectly when it left here" in about 3-4 months.
     
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  10. delorean

    delorean Megabyte Poster

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    That would be my suggestion too. Set up the email account to be forwarded to another member(s) of staff. You can do this in his active directory profile. If you want the responses to appear to come from him you will need to give the staff member(s) access to his inbox also by granting permissions in Outlook to share the mailbox.

    This should sort your problem out. :)
     
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  11. supag33k

    supag33k Kilobyte Poster

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    This would be the way to go I reckon...

    By "Chaotic" it implies your user is a tech director or boffin specialist of some type...always good people to look after ;)

    Note that if you invoke an ISP as an alternative then his 1500 emails per fortnight on your email server vanish to the isp for later forwarding...ie any email acces problems then become the "isp's problem" ...;)
     
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  12. nugget
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    nugget Junior toady

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    I'll do that too. :thumbleft
     
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