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The Microsoft Outlook E-Mail and Fax Guide
Last Updated 7/27/2009 2:10:28 PM
Chapter 12: Working Remotely with Outlook
In this chapter, you learn how staying in touch — whether you're at home, in the office, or on another continent — becomes a matter of a few clicks.
One of the chief features of Microsoft Outlook is its ability to gather messages and other information from many sources, no matter where you might be. Staying in touch — whether you're at home, in the office, or on another continent — becomes a matter of a few clicks.
This chapter is not just for travelers, though. If you use Internet E-mail, The Microsoft Network, or other similar services, you learn how to use the Remote Mail function to browse your messages and download only the most important ones. For those of you who are road warriors, we also equip you with tools to keep your Outlook folders and addresses in sync between locations.
REMOTE WORKING ENVIRONMENTS
Outlook offers three ways to work remotely:
- Online — connected for an extended period of time directly to your network, but from a remote location over a dial-up link or via the Internet.
- Offline — connected to the mail server only when you want to download and upload mail. You compose and read mail when you are disconnected.
- Synchronized (only available with the Microsoft Exchange Server service) — offline, but with mirror copies of both your mailbox folders and favorite public folders.
Online Remote Connections
Using Outlook via online remote is just like being in the office, only the slower connection requires more patience. Because you are connected just as any other node on the network is, you have access to everything on the server, including public or shared folders if you are using Exchange Server or Microsoft Mail.
You send and receive mail either automatically or by using Tools, Check for New Mail, as described in the preceding two chapters. You need no special techniques to send and receive mail when working from a remote location.
You should check "Synchronizing Folders" later in this chapter for ideas about how to keep your remote computer in sync with the one in the office. You will want to keep at least the most important items on both systems. Otherwise, you may wind up at a meeting 2,000 miles away, while the agenda and research for the meeting sit back in the Inbox on your desktop computer.
Offline Remote Connections
The offline approach probably is the most common way to connect remotely. Typically, when you work offline, you compose messages while you are disconnected from the network. Then you connect, send those messages, and get new incoming mail using Tools, Check for New Mail, as described in Chapter 10. You can also download selected messages with Tools, Remote Mail, as you'll see shortly.
Synchronized Remote Use
Synchronized remote use is available only if you connect to Microsoft Exchange Server. Exchange Server provides a mechanism for keeping an exact copy of all the folders in your mailbox (and any designated public folders) on your remote computer. You can merge changes with the originals on the Exchange Server when you connect to it.
Exchange Server users can use Check for New Mail to send and receive messages. However, you should also synchronize folders to make sure that changes to your Outlook Calendar and other folders are matched up with what's on the server.
USING REMOTE MAIL
The idea behind Remote Mail is that by knowing the who, what, and when of waiting messages, you can decide which messages to download and which to ignore. The who, what, and when of a message is contained in the message header, a line in the Information Viewer that shows you the following information:
- who sent you the message
- what the message is about (the subject) and whether the message includes an attachment
- when the message was sent
- for some services, the estimated time required to download the message
When you use Remote Mail, you perform several tasks in a specific sequence:
- Connect to download messages headers.
- Select which waiting messages to download and which to delete.
- Connect again to download and delete the selected messages.
Any messages waiting in your Outbox are sent either when you first download the headers, when the messages you marked are processed, or during both operations, depending on your choice.
Preparing for Remote Mail
Chapter 2 includes instructions for building the dial-up networking connections that you need for Remote Mail. In addition, you must also set up the individual services in your profile to work with Remote Mail. See the respective chapters in Part I of this book for details about the settings appropriate for each service. Following are few notes about particular services:
For Internet E-mail, on the Connection tab of the Properties dialog box, you must set up the connection as either "I connect manually" or "I use a modem to access my e-mail." An account set up as "I use a LAN connection" does not appear on the list of services for Remote Mail.
For the Microsoft Exchange Server service, if you have Offline Folders enabled, you cannot use Remote Mail. If you need to use Remote Mail, you must use Personal Folders as the delivery location, not your Exchange Server mailbox (see "Using Remote Mail with Exchange Server" later in this chapter).
Remote Mail cannot download headers for the CompuServe Mail service, though it can send messages from the Outbox.
Working with Remote Mail
Let's walk through a typical Remote Mail session, so you can see how it works.
- Choose Tools, Remote Mail, Connect to display the Remote Connection Wizard, shown in Figure 12.1.
- Under "Connect to which information service(s)?" check the one(s) you want to access.
- Check the "Confirm before connecting" box if you want the opportunity to change dialing locations (see "Configuring Dialing Locations" in Chapter 2).
- If you want to send everything from the Outbox and retrieve message headers, and you want to use the current dialing location, click Finish to put Remote Mail to work. Otherwise, click Next.
- On the next Remote Connection Wizard screen (Figure 12.2), you see a check box for each item in your Outbox and for each header that you might have marked for retrieval from a previous Remote Mail session. If you don't want to send or retrieve a particular item, just clear its check box.
- If you want to use the current dialing location, click Finish to start the process of uploading and retrieving mail. If you need to change locations, click Next and, on the next screen of the wizard, select the dialing location, then click Finish.
Figure 12.3 shows what the headers look like in your Inbox, mixed in with the messages you received earlier. If you've used Exchange before, you should notice this big difference between Remote Mail in Outlook and Exchange: Outlook does not use a separate Remote Mail window. When the Remote Mail connection process is complete, headers are shown in your Inbox, and the Remote toolbar (Figure 12.4) is displayed.
You can let the Remote toolbar float or drag it to the top of the Outlook window and dock it next to the regular toolbar. You can also toggle it on and off by choosing View, Toolbar, Remote or Tools, Remote Mail, Remote Tools.
When you mark headers for action, you can choose Mark to Retrieve, Mark to Retrieve a Copy, or Delete. Use Mark to Retrieve a Copy if you want to keep an item on the server, as well as in your Inbox. Headers marked for deletion go to your Deleted Items folder and are deleted from the server the next time you connect.
There are several ways to mark the downloaded headers for action:
- use the buttons on the Remote toolbar
- use the choices on the Tools, Remote Mail menu
- right-click a header and choose from the pop-up menu
- select a header, press Enter, then choose from the dialog box that appears
Once you've marked headers, here's how to retrieve the messages:
- Click the Connect button on the Remote toolbar or choose Tools, Remote Mail, Connect.
- In the Remote Connection Wizard, click Finish.
Normally, that's all you need to do. Of course, if you want to select certain actions or change the dialing location again, you can click Next to step through the wizard as in steps 2–6 earlier in this section.
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