Any way to get corp exchange email or get outlook to forward?

[greg24fan]

I know this might be a little OT with respect to the droid, but not totally. I tried and failed and expected to fail in setting up my droid to access my corporate ms exchange email. I'm sure my company has some sort of restrictions I can't or don't know how to get around. We have to be approved by some god somewhere to be able to use devices like a b-berry or droid so I'm sure they have a way to keep unapproved people out. I'm wondering if anyone knows another way? Or do you know of a function or app that I could run on my PC that would take the emails I receive in outlook and forward them to one of my other email accounts that I can access from the droid? Is there a better forum to post this in?

 

[Droidesq]

Have you tried to set up a rule in outlook to forward all of your email to your gmail account?

 

[greg24fan]

Yeh I was just playing around with that. I ran the rule against 1 unread email and I saw it forward out and it's in my sent folder on outlook. But I never got it on my home account. Our corporate nerds must have forwarding to outside accounts blocked somehow. What a pain!!! What's really strange is I just manually forwarded an email to my account and it worked. It seems to just not let emails forwarded by rules through. Any exchange gurus out there know if that's even possible?

Also, the rule doesn't seem to run by itself. If I go in and tell it to run rules now, I see it forward the messages out but as I monitor inbound email traffic, I don't see this happening automatically. I do have it set to on.

 

[jpdroid]

Yeh I was just playing around with that. I ran the rule against 1 unread email and I saw it forward out and it's in my sent folder on outlook. But I never got it on my home account. Our corporate nerds must have forwarding to outside accounts blocked somehow. What a pain!!! What's really strange is I just manually forwarded an email to my account and it worked. It seems to just not let emails forwarded by rules through. Any exchange gurus out there know if that's even possible?

Also, the rule doesn't seem to run by itself. If I go in and tell it to run rules now, I see it forward the messages out but as I monitor inbound email traffic, I don't see this happening automatically. I do have it set to on.

As one of those "corporate nerds" that you so affectionately refer to, I can tell you that the Droid does support Exchange E-mail. Perhaps you should ask your corporate IT Department how to set it up? (Although if I was in your corporate IT Department and knew how you referred to them, I personally would refuse to help you ;-) ). There is also an app called Touchdown that is supposedly better than the native Exchange client on the Droid. For the native client, you need to go to Settings => Accounts & sync => Add Account => Corporate => then you will need your corporate Exchange login and password, as well as the address of your Exchange server. If you have all of that info and your IT Department allows access, you should be able to set it up.

 

[greg24fan]

jp, I meant it as a tongue 'n cheek term of endearment as I happen to be a corporate nerd myself, just in a different department. Please don't be offended. Jeff Foxworthy once said "you can't talk about rednecks unless you are one; well I are one!". Same sentiment holds true for nerds I say.

Anyway, my problem is that it isn't up to my IT department. I'm sure it can be setup to work, technically. Problem is, because of the corporate "suits" that think only management level employees or higher can be "responsible" for important emails or mobile devices, or are somehow more deserving or in need of such technology, "nerds" at my level aren't allowed a company issued mobile "smart" device, nor will they allow us to have access to our email from our own non-company devices. So, while the technology is there, it's the policy that is my problem and the technology that appears to be in place to enforce the policy.

Anyway, thanks for helping a fellow nerd with some info. I have my exchange server address and my login and password but I'm getting nowhere. In the setup of my outlook, under the exchange settings, there is a security setting called "Logon Network Security" and it is set to NTLM password authentication and also the encryption option is turned on and greyed out. Are these settings possibly what are keeping me out?

I expect that, if they've somehow gone so far as to block emails that are forwarded by rules in outlook, they have it locked down such that I'm not going to get this to work on my own.

 

[FunN4Lo]

Have you tried to set up a rule in outlook to forward all of your email to your gmail account?

Thanks for the idea. This gives me a good temp fix while I wait for the right "corporate geek" to call me back. Temp fix because the "from" on my phone is me, so you can't just hit the reply button

 

[AnneDroid]

greg24fan: As one of them there corporate nerds, NTLM Password Authentication is pretty normal for Exchange accounts. To connect with your email you need the domain name if you're on one, your username and password, the URL for the proxy server, etc. etc. In short, you're probably not going to be able to do it without whoever set up your Exchange server in the first place. There are all kinds of bells and whistles (called rules) that they can apply on their side that you can't do much about.

Try being nice to the suits and the nerds. If nothing else, the policy will eventually change. Good luck!

 

[TreeFrog]

does your corporate email have a web based email so when your off the network you can still get mail? mine does and I just use those credentials to set it up...i get mail, contacts and calendar.

 

[lysergia]

does your corporate email have a web based email so when your off the network you can still get mail? mine does and I just use those credentials to set it up...i get mail, contacts and calendar.

That is how I setup my droid to use the exchange email at my job

we have admins and doctors who have blackberrys with special software setup on the servers for their email but I just did what TreeFrog did and got my emails and contacts.. I cant schedule things on the calendar on the droid and have them show up on the calendar at work though same with setting up a event on the calendar at work wont show up on the droid, but I think it could be my phone/workplace or possible bug in the droid OS.

 

[greg24fan]

does your corporate email have a web based email so when your off the network you can still get mail? mine does and I just use those credentials to set it up...i get mail, contacts and calendar.

We have web based access but it's via Citrix. I have a web url I go to and have to login and my home screen has outlook as one of the apps rolled out to me for viewing my email. So, I'm not sure that setup is going to give me anything for my droid.

I am nice to the suits and fellow nerds but policy is policy and I did just confirm that they won't bend on the policy. We have to be approved to be able to do this and we can only do it from company provided devices. And they obviously have some rule in place to keep anything containing the word "AutoForwarded" to an external email address from going out.

 

[jsh1120]

Just a note in defense of "suits" and "nerds" here. Not something I usually engage in. And for that matter, I detest Exchange, so this is especially out of character for me.

As far as I've been able to determine, there is virtually NO WAY to password protect either the default "gmail" or "email" apps on the Droid. Nor is there any way to disable those applications.

Thus, unless you lock your phone and refuse to allow anyone to look at it unsupervised there is no way to maintain security over email on the Droid.

If I were concerned about confidentiality of email on portable devices in my company I'd be very, very hesitant to allow any employee who receives confidential email of any kind to use the phone for corporate email.

Fortunately, the folks who oversee such things at my company aren't sufficiently tuned in to realize this is a problem, much less to deal with the lack of encryption on email sent to/from the droid, so I'm able to get whatever email I need. But firms that take things like trade secrets seriously have good reason to be wary of allowing their employees to use a Droid rather than a BlackBerry.

 

[takeshi]

We have web based access but it's via Citrix. I have a web url I go to and have to login and my home screen has outlook as one of the apps rolled out to me for viewing my email. So, I'm not sure that setup is going to give me anything for my droid.

Citrix access definitely isn't going to work.

I am nice to the suits and fellow nerds but policy is policy and I did just confirm that they won't bend on the policy. We have to be approved to be able to do this and we can only do it from company provided devices. And they obviously have some rule in place to keep anything containing the word "AutoForwarded" to an external email address from going out.

Consider yourself lucky. I'd be glad to not have access to work email on a mobile device but they pretty hand out BB's to everyone here on the way in and use them as a corporate leashes. As a result I try my best to vacation in places with no coverage. Enjoy your freedom!

 

[greg24fan]

Consider yourself lucky. I'd be glad to not have access to work email on a mobile device but they pretty hand out BB's to everyone here on the way in and use them as a corporate leashes. As a result I try my best to vacation in places with no coverage. Enjoy your freedom!

I appreciate your view on that but I don't share it. It's actually company policy for us to put such things aside and enjoy our vacations. However, this is not just about being on vacation for me. I would rather be able to officially be on vacation and keep check on emails and activities at my leisure than to be gone for a week or more and come back to a mountain of emails and responsibilities. That's just my preference. However, my job involves me either working from home or traveling. I'm never in a corporate office nor do I even have one. So, in order to stay in the loop as much as possible, I'm tethered to a laptop with a broadband aircard as my only option. It's a real pain to be driving and have to stop and boot up a laptop, connect to the internet, log in to a vpn connection, and check emails and then turn it all back off. It's the same pain to be in airports having to do the same thing. Especially when technology allows for it in the palm of my hand. And the real kick in the pants to me is that certain people in the company do have these devices and are trusted to use them, yet most of them have no real need for them as they sit behind a desk in an office behind a computer and/or a secretary all day.

 

[kylo77]

Try Touchdown from the market. I'm on my corporate exchange email with it all day long. Syncs calendar and contacts as well. Works better than the current corp email and calendar on the Droid imo.

You'll need access to the exchange service via owa or some other url depending on your server. Check with your IT team.

 

[Beachmammoni]

My understanding is that there is no way to ensure that emails can be encrypted for Droid. Something about SSL? As a healthcare system we have to protect patient information. However,I just want one-way calendar and contact updates.I do not need email or updating from the Droid. Any thoughts?