The company I work for runs on Exchange. I often see staff trying to access their personal POP3 or HTTP email through web interfaces, or from their personal laptop.

Wouldn’t it be nice if they were able to bring all their email accounts together into the one place, but still have control of them individually. This is quite possible with Exchange, and it works fantastically well.

I love having access to an Exchange server. It beats other mail protocols hands down for accessibility and control. Your mail can be accessed through a web front-end, or a full blown desktop client in the form of Outlook. Once you have your mail you can send off messages to and from a supported phone with Push technology. There is not much you can’t do with it.

I have four email accounts that each go into my Exchange account. This means that I am able to access each and every email, from any of the accounts, through my email client, my phone, or through a web interface.

This article will show you how to set this up for yourself. It is really very simple to set up, and the time saved from accessing various account individually will be significant. There will be much less email clutter to tidy up as well. There will only be one Inbox that you need to control and monitor.

There is only one minor drawback that I have come across with this setup. If you want to receive email from multiple accounts on your phone, or the web interface, you will need to leave a computer on to receive the mail from the various accounts. This computer will bring the mail from the various accounts into the one location. You may be able to scam such features from your Exchange Administrator if you are very lucky.

This is not an issue if you only access your mail from the one computer.

Setting up the multiple accounts:

This configuration works in both Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007, though it may work in other email clients. This article is written specifically for Microsoft Outlook 2007. Setting this up between the two clients is slightly different, but it is very easy so I am sure you will be able to follow this if you are using Microsoft Outlook 2003.

The first step is to make sure that your main account is an Exchange server account. This is the account/mailbox that all the other mail will be viewable from as we add them.

The next step is to create your additional accounts. We will run through this quickly. Ideally, these additional accounts will be POP3, or HTTP protocols. It is not possible to access multiple Exchange accounts from the one Exchange account. To do that you will need to utilise the “Delegate” features.

Follow these steps:

Click “Tools”
Click “Account Settings”
Click “New”
Follow the wizard

The final step is to ensure the new mail will go into your Exchange mailbox, rather than a new set of Personal Folders. It will probably do this by default.

Click “Change Folder”

Here you can create a folder specifically for your new email account, or you can send the mail directly to the Inbox.

If you want to send mail from multiple computers, and you decide to setup multiple accounts on each computer, you should decide which computer will act as the server. If you receive mail from POP3 accounts on multiple computers, you may find that you end up with multiple copies of the same email message.

You can disable receiving mail from certain accounts, within Outlook. Open the Tools Menu > Send/Receive > Send/Receive Settings. You can then remove the accounts you don’t want to receive mail from out of the default send/receive group.

Sending email:

When sending a new email message, you are able to select which account the mail is sent from. Simply write your email and click on the “Accounts” button. You will then be able to pick which account the message is sent from. It is very quick and simple.

Replying and Forwarding email:

If you use this Exchange setup, it will work well for you when replying and forwarding email. The account that your email will be sent from, will default to the account you received the email on.

You can easily change which account you send the message from by clicking on the “Accounts” button as shown above. You then see a simple pull down menu with all the available accounts which you can choose between.

If you are not on the computer setup as above, you can create the accounts you want to send the mail from, or send mail from your Exchange account. If you are concerned about making your private email address public, consider one of the first options instead.

Filtering mail into individual folders:

If you want to keep your emails from the various accounts separate, you are able to create a folder for each account, and then use rules or the “Change Folder” option in “Account Settings”, to send mail as it is received into their corresponding folder.

If you want your sent email to be split up according to the account they were sent from, create a folder within “Sent Items” for each account. You can then create a rules to filter your sent emails into each of these folders as each email is sent.

I don’t bother with this step as it would force me to look in multiple folders to access my mail. If you do want to use separate folders for each account, it may be worth setting up your rules so that they send the messages into their folder only once the email has been read.

Signatures:

It is possible to setup a different email signature for each account you send your mail from. Once this is setup in Outlook, your signature will change automatically as you change your account. This works really well if you have both your work email and your personal email working together in the same Exchange account.

To set this up, follow these steps:

Click “Tools”
Click “Options”
Click “Mail Format”

Create a signature for each account, or however many signatures you want. Then select each account and associate it with a signature.

Once you click “OK”, your signatures will follow you around as if you were using multiple email clients.

Conclusion:

Outlook was designed for this functionality. There is nothing magical about this configuration, we are just making the most out of Exchange and Outlook.

I hope you have enjoyed this article and found it useful. Please stick around and check out some other articles at Inspect My Gadget.