[jrice8002003]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but up to this point I've completely blocked out anything pertaining to BES/Exchange/whatever, as these items haven't ever applied to me. Recently, however, my firm switched to an Exchange server (excuse me if I'm lacking the technical terms), and we were told that those with a BlackBerry may need to upgrade to a BES data plan in order to get our work e-mail (Outlook) pushed to our devices. As far as I know, there have been no talks of the firm reimbursing the employees for the added cost of a BES plan. This has irritated a lot of folks, and many don't plan on upgrading. This is going to make work a lot more inefficient overall, which is why I think our firm should just pony up the extra cost for everyone, but that's another story. Anyway, I'm wondering if there is another way to receive work e-mail on my device.

I was browsing around our firm's Outlook Web App (OWA) site, and found an e-mail forwarding option (Options/Organize E-mail/Inbox Rules). I tried setting up a rule to have all messages that are received by Outlook forwarded on to my personal Yahoo account. I sent some test messages, but it's not working; no work e-mail is being forwarded to my Yahoo account. Is this something that can be blocked or disabled by an IT department? A co-worker of mine tried it too, and it didn't work for him either.

I also tried setting up a rule that Outlook sends a text message to my device when I receive a new e-mail. Strangely, that works, but I can only see who the message is from and the first few words of the message, so it's not particularly useful. If the e-mail forwarding was indeed blocked by IT, I wonder why the text messaging rule would work...

Does anyone have a work-around to receive work e-mail on my phone, or is my only uption to upgrade to a BES plan?

[Dubdub]

Does the company allow POP and/or IMAP access? Have you tried setting up the email in BIS?

[jamead1981]

If you have Outlook Web Access from outside of the office (i.e at home on your personal computer) then you can configure that via Blackberry Internet Service to receive your email.

[jrice8002003]

Originally Posted by Dubdub

Does the company allow POP and/or IMAP access? Have you tried setting up the email in BIS?

How would I know whether they allow POP and/or IMAP? Sorry, like I said, not too familiar with this stuff. My work e-mail was set up in BIS, but when they changed servers, it stopped working. I've tried deleting and re-adding my account in BIS, but I get an error message every time.

Originally Posted by jamead1981

If you have Outlook Web Access from outside of the office (i.e at home on your personal computer) then you can configure that via Blackberry Internet Service to receive your email.

How can I do this? The URL for my work e-mail from outside the office used to be fiamail.companyname.com. Using these settings, e-mail was sent to my BlackBerry as usual. Now the URL is owa.companyname.com, but I can't get anything to work.

[jrice8002003]

One of our IT guys just informed me that it's against company policy to forward work e-mails (which could contain sensitive information) to unsecure, third party e-mail accounts. So my e-mail forwarding idea probably stops right there. Sounds like my only options are to a.) go without work e-mail on my device (maybe not a bad thing), or b.) fork over the extra $ for a BES plan.

[djm2]

Did you ask him about whether Outlook Web Access would be allowed on the BB, and if so how you should manually set it up with BIS?