Outlook-Forwarding said:
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.
