2011-07-19

Poor man's Outlook

I need to access my company's Exchange server at home. However, my home PC has not a valid Outlook license.

It is a pity some the open source email projects only endorse open protocol and do not bother to implement the proprietary Microsoft email protocol MAPI.

So far, I have resorted to command email client supporting POP3/SMTP to remotely access my company emails (not IMAP support yet).

Because of the limitation of POP3/SMTP, my email access at home is not working as a sychronized copy of my company email store.

For example,
  1. Using POP3, I must configure the email client to "keep the emails after downloading". Otherwise, when I check in my company email again, I will find some of my emails are removed from the inbox.

  2. However, I cannot delete any junk email or processed emails at home and keep my company inbox growing after long out-of-office period. Worst still, my company has set up an inbox rules that limit my email activities after the inbox has reached a certain size (an unreasonably low figure)

  3. If I need to send emails out at home, I must "cc" myself so that my company email has a replicate copy. This even makes my company inbox bigger and bigger.

  4. I cannot use the other Outlook "advanced" features, like Out-of-Office assistant

To solve problem (2), I now use Magic Mail Monitor to directly remove junk or processes emails at my company inbox.

To solve problem (4), I use MFCMAPI

But since my home PC has no Outlook, I need to download "Microsoft Exchange Server MAPI Client and Collaboration Data Objects 1.2.1" first so that MFCMAPI can allow me to create a new Exchange profile. Please refer to the thread at serverfault.com