How do I automatically send incoming messages to Hotmail address?

[Rogereye]

I would like to have Outlook automatically forward all my incoming e-mail
messages to my Hotmail account. Is there a way to do that?

 

[David C. Holley]

Are you in a corporate environment using Outlook to access mail on an
Exchange server? If you are, then you need to check with your IT department
first to confirm that doing so will not be a violation of corporate IT
security policy. Typically, companies have policies in place explicity
stating that company emails should *not* be forwarded to an employee's
personal email account as doing so may expose confidential information.

 

[VanguardLH]

Are you in a corporate environment using Outlook to access mail on an
Exchange server? If you are, then you need to check with your IT department
first to confirm that doing so will not be a violation of corporate IT
security policy. Typically, companies have policies in place explicity
stating that company emails should *not* be forwarded to an employee's
personal email account as doing so may expose confidential information.

Rogereye wrote ...

Not only do companies not want their documents on some unknown and
untrusted service but there are security concerns as to who can see that
e-mail. Plus they don't want personal fluff (not company related) on
their mail servers or in their backups.

Rather than use rules that test if an e-mail is from a non-company
contact to then forward them to a personal-use and definitely
non-company e-mail service, just tell those personal contacts to send
their e-mails directly to your personal e-mail account. It's not that
complicated, especially if you send a reply to the personal contact that
you won't read their e-mails sent to your work account. If they don't
oblige, send them one final e-mail notifying them that they are now
blacklisted at your work account (and then actually follow up with that
threat by adding them to you Blocked Senders or blacklist rule).

Also, the IT folks could be sniffing their network's traffic. I
guarantee you that they can see you rerouting e-mails to an off-domain
mail server if they feel so inclined. You can get in hot water for
committing that policy violation (assuming there is a company policy
about redirecting company documents, of e-mails are included, to
somewhere other than onto company hosts). If the company wanted all
their company-related e-mails made public, they'd save them in a public
blog that anyone could read.

Plus all those e-mails received at work and then forwarded elsewhere
were still delivered to your mailbox at work. That you delete them in
Outlook doesn't preclude that copies of ALL e-mails are retained for
historical, tracking, and monitoring purposes at work. If they want,
the mail admins WILL know what got delivered to your mailbox which is a
company resource and their property. Forwarding them outside the
company doesn't mean your company won't see what was in them.

Most companies don't care if you access your personal-use e-mail account
to read and send your messages using THAT off-domain e-mail service.
They just don't want that crap on their mail servers, especially since
in the past it has come back to bite those companies when, for example,
the employees non-official comments are brought up in a court case.
Forwarding makes that e-mail originate from the company's domain. The
content of that personal e-mail can damage a company's reputation. If
you owned a company, would you like it to appear that porn was emanating
from your domain just because employees were forwarding from there?

 

[VanguardLH]

I would like to have Outlook automatically forward all my incoming e-mail
messages to my Hotmail account. Is there a way to do that?

- Are you going to leave your host powered on every hour of every day?
- Do you have a *huge* UPS on your host to keep it powered on during
outages?
- If the outage lasts longer than your UPS, do you have your host
(hardware and operating system) configured to automatically reboot,
automatically log into the (which obviates all login security so
anyone walking over to your host can use it), and automatically load
Outlook to allow recovery after the outage?
- Are you going to run your host at full power all the time (i.e., no
power-saving modes)? NICs often disable themself in Standby mode (you
might be able to configure it to not go into power-saving mode).
Hibernate mode means powering off your host so nothing runs.
- How reliable is both your ISP and e-mail service to ensure that
Outlook can forward your e-mails?
- What macros are you going to code or buy to allow Outlook to act as a
mail server to perform retries when there is a failure to establish a
mail session with your sending mail host or when there is a failure
during that mail session? For example, how are you going to recover
when Outlook starts complaining about invalid login credentials?
- Do you really think Outlook makes for a reliable mail *server*?
Consider yourself lucky if you haven't had problems with using it as a
*client*.

Yes, you can define a RULE (hint, hint) that forwards your e-mails.
However, forwarding is something best done by a mail server. Use the
webmail interface to your e-mail account to see if it has a forwarding
option.