February 21, 2002
Good news and bad news

Ginger talks about the sad state of computer documentation, and wonders how one can redirect mail in Outlook. I have good news and bad news for you, Ginger. It looks like it can be done, but as if often the case with Microsoft, it depends.

I dinked around in my Outlook 2000 client at work, and in the Rules Wizard there is an option to "redirect" mail (as opposed to "forward" mail) to another person. I didn't finish off this rule - more on that in a minute - but it seems to me that this would do what you and David Pogue would want, as it seems like the equivalent of setting an alternate recipient on the mailbox via Exchange Admin.

The bad news is that this can only be done as a server-side rule. Most of the rules on my profile say "client only", and when I tried to add a rule to test this out, it refused since I was apparently trying to add a client-side rule. Of course, with Outlook, it's impossible to tell how and why rules are client- or server-side. I do have one server-side rule on this profile, so I know I can test this out, but I'll probably build a new profile and test it out on that instead. I'll let you know if I succeed. And you do need Outlook 2000 - a warning popped up when I picked the "redirect" criterion to make sure I knew that. You'd think the software would know its own version...oh, let's not go there.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on February 21, 2002 to Technology, science, and math | TrackBack
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