Hi,

Does anybody know if it is possible to automatically forward email messages
to alternate email accounts? I.e. If email enquiries come through on a main
email account is it possible to forward the 1st email to Advisor 1 and then
the 2nd email to Advisor 2 and then keep automatically alternating who the
emails are forwarded on to in order to split the workload between say 2 or 3
employees?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Automatically alternating? Not very easily - I suppose you could write some
VBA code that could track/update a variable and do it.

What version of Outlook are you using?

--
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, MVP
Roland Schorr & Tower
http://www.rolandschorr.com
http://www.officeforlawyers.com/outlook.htm
Author: The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2007:
http://tinyurl.com/ol4law-amazon

"Outlook-Forwarding" <Outlook-(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in
message news:60DAC23A-148F-4868-B593-(E-Mail Removed)...
> Hi,
>
> Does anybody know if it is possible to automatically forward email
> messages
> to alternate email accounts? I.e. If email enquiries come through on a
> main
> email account is it possible to forward the 1st email to Advisor 1 and
> then
> the 2nd email to Advisor 2 and then keep automatically alternating who the
> emails are forwarded on to in order to split the workload between say 2 or
> 3
> employees?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help.

Outlook-Forwarding wrote:

> Does anybody know if it is possible to automatically forward email messages
> to alternate email accounts? I.e. If email enquiries come through on a main
> email account is it possible to forward the 1st email to Advisor 1 and then
> the 2nd email to Advisor 2 and then keep automatically alternating who the
> emails are forwarded on to in order to split the workload between say 2 or 3
> employees?

Use a rule. Of course, that means you must leave Outlook always running or
accept that the rule will only be ran when you next load Outlook for new
e-mails that arrive after when you last unloaded Outlook.

Better would be to use forwarding or polling by your mail server. Some
e-mail providers have an option where you can either forward e-mails to
another account or poll other accounts to yank e-mails from there.

Forwarding means there is no login to the other account. E-mails get sent
to the other account just as any other e-mails that go there. No one needs
to login into your account to send you e-mails. For most freebie e-mail
accounts, you must login periodically to prevent an idle expiration from
disabling or deleting your freebie account. Since forwarding does not
login, you cannot use it to keep-alive your account to which you forward
your e-mails. That's why polling other accounts is better for use with
freebie e-mail accounts. Polling requires logging into the other account,
and that login keeps alive that other account. If these are paid accounts,
you can use either forwarding or polling to transfer e-mails between
accounts without fear of your account expiring (until you choose to close
that account or choose/neglect to pay for it).

An option on your e-mail account to forward to another account or to poll
another account will not perform the alternating that you want to perform a
crappy means of load balancing amongst several users that are sharing a base
account. I have not seen either a client- or server-side rule that will
toggle between where to send an e-mail unless there exists criteria within
the e-mail on which to trigger. This alternating scheme could end up
sending e-mails to someone that is on vacation who won't see any e-mails
until they get back, and won't obviously work when employees leave (sometime
without notice) or are terminated. Splitting workloads based on just e-mail
counts is rather stupid. One e-mail may involve a problem that requires
massive manpower or resources to resolve whereas another could require only
a quick off-the-cuff reply. Just have them share the same mailbox and pick
which e-mails they will work on.

If using IMAP, each user could drag the e-mails they want into their own
subfolder (like having subfolder under the Inbox folder that are either
named for each worker if all folders are subscribed when using IMAP or to
their own private folder which isn't created on the server and not
subscribed so it remains a private folder). IMAP would make managing the
e-mails easy since workers would elect which e-mails to grab and move them
out of the Inbox folder. POP access means every worker would have to
configure their e-mail account defined in their e-mail client to "leave
messages on server" so they stay there for everyone to see that is polling
the shared mailbox but then there is no obvious indication of who is working
on which e-mail. When you configure a POP account to "leave messages on
server", the disk quota gets eaten up over time. All the old e-mails will
still be sitting there in your mailbox and eventually you won't be able to
receive any more new inbound e-mails because there is no disk space to store
them. That means you have to manually clean up your mailbox (by using the
webmail interface to your e-mail account) or use the "remove messages from
server after N days" option in the e-mail account that you defined in
Outlook to help clean up your old account. Obviously the retention interval
has to be long enough for all users to ensure they can retrieve a copy, like
say a month but could also depend on how much disk quota your shared mailbox
is allocated and the volume (frequence and size) of e-mail traffic to that
mailbox. Since you never mentioned using Exchange as the mail server,
there's no point in going into the use of accounts and Shared or Public
folders.

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the reply, I did think about using vba code but I'm not too sure
of the syntax. I made a start on pseudo code that would work something like
this:

set numbervariable at 0

advisor1=advisor1emailaddress

advisor2=advisor2emailaddress

start loop

check for new email, subject="contact us form"

if numbervariable = odd number then
advisor=advisor1
else if
numbervariable = even number
advisor=advisor2

when new email then forward to advisor

numbervariable=numbervariable+1

repeatloop

Which I supose should work if Outlook was left running on 1 machine to send
the emails, I just wondered if there may be an easier solution and also I
would need to write the vba code.

Thanks for your help.

David

"Ben M. Schorr, MVP" wrote:

> Automatically alternating? Not very easily - I suppose you could write some
> VBA code that could track/update a variable and do it.
>
> What version of Outlook are you using?
>
> --
> -Ben-
> Ben M. Schorr, MVP
> Roland Schorr & Tower
> http://www.rolandschorr.com
> http://www.officeforlawyers.com/outlook.htm
> Author: The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2007:
> http://tinyurl.com/ol4law-amazon
>
> "Outlook-Forwarding" <Outlook-(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in
> message news:60DAC23A-148F-4868-B593-(E-Mail Removed)...
> > Hi,
> >
> > Does anybody know if it is possible to automatically forward email
> > messages
> > to alternate email accounts? I.e. If email enquiries come through on a
> > main
> > email account is it possible to forward the 1st email to Advisor 1 and
> > then
> > the 2nd email to Advisor 2 and then keep automatically alternating who the
> > emails are forwarded on to in order to split the workload between say 2 or
> > 3
> > employees?
> >
> > Thanks in advance for any help.
>

..... sorry! I am using Outlook 2003


"Ben M. Schorr, MVP" wrote:

> Automatically alternating? Not very easily - I suppose you could write some
> VBA code that could track/update a variable and do it.
>
> What version of Outlook are you using?
>
> --
> -Ben-
> Ben M. Schorr, MVP
> Roland Schorr & Tower
> http://www.rolandschorr.com
> http://www.officeforlawyers.com/outlook.htm
> Author: The Lawyer's Guide to Microsoft Outlook 2007:
> http://tinyurl.com/ol4law-amazon
>
> "Outlook-Forwarding" <Outlook-(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in
> message news:60DAC23A-148F-4868-B593-(E-Mail Removed)...
> > Hi,
> >
> > Does anybody know if it is possible to automatically forward email
> > messages
> > to alternate email accounts? I.e. If email enquiries come through on a
> > main
> > email account is it possible to forward the 1st email to Advisor 1 and
> > then
> > the 2nd email to Advisor 2 and then keep automatically alternating who the
> > emails are forwarded on to in order to split the workload between say 2 or
> > 3
> > employees?
> >
> > Thanks in advance for any help.
>

Hi VanguardLH,

Thanks for the reply. Is it possible to do the alternating forwarding using
exchange?

Thanks,

David

"VanguardLH" wrote:

> Outlook-Forwarding wrote:
>
> > Does anybody know if it is possible to automatically forward email messages
> > to alternate email accounts? I.e. If email enquiries come through on a main
> > email account is it possible to forward the 1st email to Advisor 1 and then
> > the 2nd email to Advisor 2 and then keep automatically alternating who the
> > emails are forwarded on to in order to split the workload between say 2 or 3
> > employees?
>
> Use a rule. Of course, that means you must leave Outlook always running or
> accept that the rule will only be ran when you next load Outlook for new
> e-mails that arrive after when you last unloaded Outlook.
>
> Better would be to use forwarding or polling by your mail server. Some
> e-mail providers have an option where you can either forward e-mails to
> another account or poll other accounts to yank e-mails from there.
>
> Forwarding means there is no login to the other account. E-mails get sent
> to the other account just as any other e-mails that go there. No one needs
> to login into your account to send you e-mails. For most freebie e-mail
> accounts, you must login periodically to prevent an idle expiration from
> disabling or deleting your freebie account. Since forwarding does not
> login, you cannot use it to keep-alive your account to which you forward
> your e-mails. That's why polling other accounts is better for use with
> freebie e-mail accounts. Polling requires logging into the other account,
> and that login keeps alive that other account. If these are paid accounts,
> you can use either forwarding or polling to transfer e-mails between
> accounts without fear of your account expiring (until you choose to close
> that account or choose/neglect to pay for it).
>
> An option on your e-mail account to forward to another account or to poll
> another account will not perform the alternating that you want to perform a
> crappy means of load balancing amongst several users that are sharing a base
> account. I have not seen either a client- or server-side rule that will
> toggle between where to send an e-mail unless there exists criteria within
> the e-mail on which to trigger. This alternating scheme could end up
> sending e-mails to someone that is on vacation who won't see any e-mails
> until they get back, and won't obviously work when employees leave (sometime
> without notice) or are terminated. Splitting workloads based on just e-mail
> counts is rather stupid. One e-mail may involve a problem that requires
> massive manpower or resources to resolve whereas another could require only
> a quick off-the-cuff reply. Just have them share the same mailbox and pick
> which e-mails they will work on.
>
> If using IMAP, each user could drag the e-mails they want into their own
> subfolder (like having subfolder under the Inbox folder that are either
> named for each worker if all folders are subscribed when using IMAP or to
> their own private folder which isn't created on the server and not
> subscribed so it remains a private folder). IMAP would make managing the
> e-mails easy since workers would elect which e-mails to grab and move them
> out of the Inbox folder. POP access means every worker would have to
> configure their e-mail account defined in their e-mail client to "leave
> messages on server" so they stay there for everyone to see that is polling
> the shared mailbox but then there is no obvious indication of who is working
> on which e-mail. When you configure a POP account to "leave messages on
> server", the disk quota gets eaten up over time. All the old e-mails will
> still be sitting there in your mailbox and eventually you won't be able to
> receive any more new inbound e-mails because there is no disk space to store
> them. That means you have to manually clean up your mailbox (by using the
> webmail interface to your e-mail account) or use the "remove messages from
> server after N days" option in the e-mail account that you defined in
> Outlook to help clean up your old account. Obviously the retention interval
> has to be long enough for all users to ensure they can retrieve a copy, like
> say a month but could also depend on how much disk quota your shared mailbox
> is allocated and the volume (frequence and size) of e-mail traffic to that
> mailbox. Since you never mentioned using Exchange as the mail server,
> there's no point in going into the use of accounts and Shared or Public
> folders.
> .
>

Outlook-Forwarding wrote:

> Thanks for the reply. Is it possible to do the alternating forwarding using
> exchange?

Only folks in the exchange newsgroups could answer that question. However,
I suspect any server-side rules defined for an Exchange mailbox can only
trigger on the criteria that can be defined within those rules, and I have
never seen some "toggling" clause available in any rule. You would have to
define your own VBA macro to use in every instance of Outlook for users that
were sharing the same mailbox or a mail server script for your mailbox that
could do what you want. That would be a task for a programmer.

Hi VanguardLH,

Thanks for your help it is much appreciated.

Best regards,

David

"VanguardLH" wrote:

> Outlook-Forwarding wrote:
>
> > Thanks for the reply. Is it possible to do the alternating forwarding using
> > exchange?
>
> Only folks in the exchange newsgroups could answer that question. However,
> I suspect any server-side rules defined for an Exchange mailbox can only
> trigger on the criteria that can be defined within those rules, and I have
> never seen some "toggling" clause available in any rule. You would have to
> define your own VBA macro to use in every instance of Outlook for users that
> were sharing the same mailbox or a mail server script for your mailbox that
> could do what you want. That would be a task for a programmer.
> .
>