My school, as well as many others, uses Microsoft Exchange server for email. It provides a nifty little web interface that resembles Outlook. Sadly, it does not feature a search function. This means that it is a severe pain finding old emails. Other drawbacks to using the school’s email system include loss of account after you graduate, as well as a 100mb storage limit. This may seem reasonable, but consider that you’ll be using it for the next four years. Possibly more, for some of us. After a semester and a half, mine is already a quarter full; I’m not even a heavy email user.
So, what is one to do? You could live with it, but I dislike living with annoyances. I believe I have found a better solution: forward all your mail to Gmail.
Unfortunately, Exchange provides no way to forward email. That’s ok. Gmail has a feature to automatically grab email from any pop-enabled inbox. Here’s how to do it.
- Get a Gmail account. You can use your existing one, or set up a new one for this specific purpose. I opted for the latter.
- Click on the “Settings” link in the upper right-hand corner of the Gmail interface.
- Click on “Accounts”
- See the “Get mail from other accounts” field? Go for it.
- The address you enter for POP should be the address you go to for webmail, with the “exchange/” post-fix removed. The default port should be fine.
- Note that you can opt to reply to email using the the university address. I’ve got Gmail set to do this for mail grabbed from the university account.
- Also note that you can set imported email to be automatically tagged. Very, very nice.
- Sit back and wait. Gmail will periodically grab email (starting with newest) from the account in 200mb chunks. It might take a while.
So, yeah. Gmail is searchable, Gmail dosen’t randomly mark emails from my parents as spam, and Gmail has about twenty-eight times more storage space then the school gives me. I really don’t have much reason to open up university webmail anymore.
Thanks! I hadn’t thought of downloading via Gmail’s new Pop feature!
I had set up exchange just to forward the emails to my Gmail account. The downside of this was that all the messages appeared to be from me, they were converted to plain text, and the subject always included a FW.
I’ve just set up up Gmail to download my LeTu mail via pop. It works great.
Thanks again,
Elijah
One cravat - all mail Gmail fetches will be marked as read next time you access your university inbox via imap or web interface. Not a huge deal though, since you’ll be reading them in Gmail, and they show up unread there.
Unfortunately this only works if your university supports POP. Liberty University doesn’t, It’s exchange or IMAP.
it didn’t worked for me.
Error “Privet IP address”
What is Liberty University’s IMAP information?
Hi
I tried to do those sittings but it doesn’t work
the problem is I can’t cconnect to pop server for gmail
please can any body help me.
This is a post about using Gmail to grab email from an Exchange pop server; connecting to Gmail’s pop server is another matter.
Have you read this page? I think you’ll find it most helpful.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=12805
Don’t forget that you need to enable pop from within Gmail before trying to get mail!
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13273&disablechatbrowsercheck=1
Exchange DOES support full forwarding (you still see who the messages were from and to) but you have to do it at the Active Directory level, so you will need your IT person to set that up for you.
You Rock! I wonder if this prevents IT from reading my email now…
I’m sorry to say I tried it and it’s not working for me ! - I’m not sure why.
The Exchange server administrator needs to have enabled POP for this to function. Without it, there’s not much you can do, sorry.