IIS and Email?

Ok, this question simply dumbstruck me with its improper assumptions that I felt necessary to respond...

Question:

Hi, I just started working at a new startup company that does all their email via an IIS server, POPing into outlook express. I would really prefer to not have to use outlook express, but I can't find any way to have my email here forwarded to the email address I regularly use (someusername@gmail.com). Or rather, I can have outlook express do the forwarding, but then I still have to go to it, log in, and send/receive.

Is there any way to have our IIS server auto-forward my emails somewhere else?

thanks very much for any help

Answer:

From a legal standpoint, I suggest you comply with your employer's configuration and use Outlook Express to check work email. The moment you work for someone else and handle someone else's property (email sent to your company account is company property, not your property), you have to play by their rules or else face consequences. Forwarding company property to an outside account is generally viewed as a no-no.

From a personal standpoint, I advise against using work email for personal use and vice versa. If you keep thing separate, it is much easier to organize your work/life balance. For example, if you leave the startup, you don't want your non-work friends still sending to your account at the startup. Likewise, you don't want your coworkers sending email to your personal account. Thus, I would never recommend the sort of forwarding that you are asking about.

I think you are trying to "organize" your life by having all email addresses forward email to one account so that you can check it all via one GMail client interface. Unfortunately, GMail does not support that scenario and probably never will. Why?

Because fundamentally, GMail is an email service with a web UI and NOT an email client. The sort of organization you want is best done with an email client like Outlook Express which can easily POP against GMail and any other POP servers and provide one consolidated view of all those accounts. Forwarding email around is just a horrible poor-man's hack.

For example, I run Outlook Express to get a single consolidated view of all my email accounts at yahoo, hotmail, and Gmail as well as Newsgroup posts. This is what email clients are good at; this is not what an email service does.

In other words, your desire to use GMail interface to check email has two major stumbling blocks:

1. Your desire of user interface is irrelevant when it comes to corporate policy. If you don't like the policy, either get it changed or don't work there. If you violate policy, don't be surprised at the consequences.
2. What you want to do is really not supported by GMail. GMail does not currently support POPping from other POP servers, which is what you actually want to do because you want to use the GMail interface but against non-GMail email source. I somewhat doubt this will ever happen because it would break search and other GMail features against the non-GMail email source.

Basically, since GMail does not support what you want to do, I think you started looking at other methods to get email into that account... and that was when you started wondering about forwarding from another POP client or forwarding from the SMTP server itself.

But since IIS has nothing to do with email (it is a web server), and I have no idea what your employer uses for SMTP server, I can only say that technically, the ability to Forward depends on that SMTP server's capabilities and your permissions to modify it.

But in your case, I suggest AGAINST what you are asking. Just check company email with Outlook Express like everyone else because GMail does not support your usage pattern. Your problem is really with GMail not supporting your usage scenario and not with any intervening client/server's ability to Forward email, so keep the solution in the same realm.

//David

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2006
  Actually, Microsoft DOES have the instructions to use GMail with Outlook . . .
  
  http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/assistance/ha011488981033.aspx

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2006
  The approach of using a single email reader for multiple accounts (Outlook in your case, Thunderbird in mine), is workable and - at least was - the best possible solution, it will not be the best solution going into the future.
  
  But ... at this point I would not longer recommend this as the preferred solution. At base you do not want to run any application on the desktop for while there is a good-enough equivalent on the web.    For me GMail has finally crossed that threshold as a mail reader.  For work email (hosted on Exchange) Outlook Web Access is adequate (if less than great).  About the only time I fire up Outlook when I have to schedule a meeting - thankfully not often.  (Also of interest is that fact that even the current early form Google Calendar is decent - and groks meeting requests from Exchange.)
  
  Looking further out - if you can get the organization to change it's ways - it no longer makes sense for a most companies to host their own email servers.  Google is working on a variant of GMail to host your company email.  You can support a fair-sized organization off an inexpensive web-hosting account.  

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2006
  I have a similar problem. I have a client using IIS (SMTP service) for their mail server. Every few months somebody will email me at the client's domain instead of my gmail account. I'm not going to run Outlook Express constantly just so I can get the occasional misaddressed email, so it would be nice if there were an easy way to forward messaged.
  
  I'm thinking about writing a simple service to watch the server's Drop directory and send the messages for me to my gmail account, but it would be nice if there were an easier way. I think that's what the original poster was asking for.

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 14, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 15, 2006
  Apoligies David!  The comments you take offense to were directed only towards the logic, not you personally.  After posting here I read several of your other posts and found them to be interesting and amusing (especially the one on job descriptions).
  
  My intention wasn't to defend gmail (although i think its the best of the free web email services.... thats not saying much); rather I hoped to point out the way that you sidestepped the question in a manner that made it seem as if you were exposing some ignorance on the part of Anonymous emailer.  My thoughts when I first read the email from Anonymous and the following comments were something like this: "Thats a reasonable question.  Oh wait, its not a reasonable queston?  The emailer hasn't got a clue? That can't be right...."
  
  In short, I felt like your initial impression of Anonymous emailer biased you in your response.

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  James Vierra: WS2003 has a simple POP manager
  Maurits: there's no POP server that comes with IIS
  
  ... er, I should say, there's no POP server that comes with IIS as of W2K.  Does the WS2003 MSA support automatic forwarding?

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  Maurits - It's like ".NET". What is ".NET". Does ASP .NET have anything to do with the CLR or IIS. You see it in the control panel under one of them but is installed with the other...
  
  Treat technology as it is, not how it is marketed or positioned...
  
  //David

• Anonymous
  May 20, 2006
  Interesting discussion.  I would like to point out the problem with one proposed solution - using Outlook Express (or Outlook) as a unified client to access mail from multiple services.
  
  You mentioned that one can use Outlook to pull in mail from yahoo, work, etc. yet you were quick to jump on the guy about violating his company's email policy.
  
  I think you need to check your own (Microsoft's) or any major company's computer policy.
  
  STORING personal non-work related documents or information is usually a violation of most well structured (legally) policies for use of a company-supplied computer.
  
  The act of pop'ing Yahoo or other mail places personal, non work data on your computer.
  
  thus, other than your personally owned home computer, using a client as the unification point is typically a violation of company policy.
  
  Conversely, using a web-based email reader to pull in other email from pop accounts would be ok if teh web-based reader is not company supplied.
  
  Of course, from a legal standpoint, simply accessing a web-based mail reader to check your personal mail from any work computer, even though nothing "remains" on the computer (cleared cache, right) is still a violation of computer policy.
  
  Now, I wonder how many people that work at Microsoft are in daily violation of at least one of these computer use policies?

• Anonymous
  May 27, 2006
  Robert - uhh... sorry, you are assuming I am a hypocrit...
  
  I never suggested the user to consolidate personal email at work. I suggested:
  1. keeping the work and personel email separate
  2. for the user to check company email using Outlook Express as the company does because of the potential legal problems
  3. use an email client to consolidate access, not GMail since it is not designed for it
  
  Of course, I cannot speak for anyone else's habits. I personally separate my work and personal computer activities, and I use Outlook Express to consolidate appropriately. Work related accounts stay at work and never accessed from home and vice versa. Yes, I do not even browse the web casually from work... I don't have that time.
  
  So, I think I stand on pretty solid grounds here. It is just me and my suggestion since it was asked of me.
  
  You are always free to do what you want.
  
  //David

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2006
  David,
  SMTP has been a part of IIS since IIS4. The first page of the IIS6 Operations Guide states:
  "Organizations of all sizes use IIS to host and manage Web pages on the Internet or on their intranet, to host and manage FTP sites, and to route news or mail using the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). "
  The overview in the IIS4 Resource kit states:
  "IIS now includes a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) mail service that can send and receive SMTP mail messages"
  It's not fair to just call it marketing or product positioning either - the SMTP Service (along with the FTP, NNTP and ,in the past, Gopher service) share much IIS operational and management infrastructure with the WWW Service - it's one of IIS's strengths.
  It's perfectly reasonable to focus on the WWW Service in your blog but you do advertise it as an IIS blog. People looking for a place to ask an SMTP question might reasonably assume your blog might cover it unless they read through your archives.

• Anonymous
  June 24, 2006
  Matt - uhh, yeah... can you please stop by and tell the IIS team that:
  1. SMTP is a part of it
  2. Exchange team does not own SMTP
  3. There is a new web server called "WWW Service"
  
  And somehow get us all into the same management division?
  Thanks a whole bunch. :-)
  
  hehe... it is all HISTORICAL marketing and product positioning. Of course, you can feel free to trust the documentation folks to get it right; if I did, I would not be blogging (see my bio)... //David

• Anonymous
  July 03, 2006
  Though i might be deviating a bit from the core topic. I would like to know if there is a facility (gmail or email client or any software) that can now only consolidate mails from my 4 accounts but also ensure that when i reply to an email, the reply is sent from the email id on which the email was received.

• Anonymous
  July 31, 2007
  http://blogs.msdn.com/bowerm/archive/2007/07/01/the-demise-of-email-as-a-collaboration-tool.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

• Anonymous
  August 23, 2007
  Gmail does support popping. I may be mis-interpreting the problem here, but Gmail does let you get mail from external POP3 servers. It also lets you reply to messages with the receiving email address. Just to put the icing on the cake, Google also let you install the Gmail interface on your server, meaning all your email can stay in house, while you still have the GMail UI. So you can have your cake and eat it- use GMail UI, keep data on your company servers. And if folks still prefer thunderbird, Gmail also lets you access Gmail accounts with POP3 access from a client.

• Anonymous
  February 14, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 12, 2010
  "Is there any way to have our IIS server auto-forward my emails somewhere else?" IIS is either dropping the mail into an Exchange Server or some other third-party POP server. I know in Exchange messages can be forwarded to an external e-mail address instead of being hosted in an Exchange mailbox. If you don't have Exchange and your 3rd party POP server does not have the feature to forward your mail then you can write an IIS Event Sink in VBscript to catch mail addressed specifically to you and forward it to you.