Getting E-mail Out of OWA
or ... "Ha, take that ITS"
The Problem...
Getting all my e-mail in one place has been something of a challenge recently, the goal was to have all my e-mail end up under one account - with a single web interface to access all my e-mail on the go. Finally, tonight I think I've cracked it with the help of fetchExc.
The tricky part has been my University e-mail, Durham by default only allows you to access your e-mail though Outlook Web Access (OWA), and despite campaigning and pestering from myself, the CompSoc and even the Student Union President they have refused to allow student's access to their mail though POP, IMAP or redirecting e-mails directly in Exchange. The only option available is an OWA rule that allows you to forward e-mails to another account, however in the process of doing so all the headers are lost. In durham-to-durham e-mails even the sender of the original e-mail's address is lost - and only their Exchange 'friendly name' is displayed (such as "P. NICHOLLS")
Alex originally wrote a script that took these forwarded e-mails, re-headed them with the sender address - or looked up the sender address from friendly name via University LDAP, then sent them on to another account (in my case to gmail). This was ok, but still not ideal. I'd been using that system up until now, getting more and more frustrated when it was unable to look up addressses, lost CC and mailing list information, and so on. (Not to knock the actual script, there's no way it could access this information its a very bad design fault on OWA's part).
The Solution...
Then tonight, after a lot of playing around I finally made a breakthrough when I discovered fetchExc. This is able to connect to OWA using WebDAV, download the e-mails it finds then send them on to another account. Most importantly though it runs on a server, rather than being a desktop application (such as pop2owa which is a POP gateway for OWA which I used to use to get my Exchange mail into Thunderbird) which means it can update gmail in near-to-real-time and still fit in with my plan of having everything mobile and web-based.