Forward email from your desktop to your mobile device
In "Wireless Email," May 2001, I discussed email forwarding as a way to enable mobile email. Now, Microsoft has packaged this capability for Outlook users—provided those users get their mail from a Microsoft Exchange Server machine. The product is Microsoft Outlook Mobile Manager (MOMM), and you can download the 6MB file for free from http://www.microsoft.com/miserver/downloads/omm.asp.
MOMM depends on SMTP forwarding, which means that it expects the Exchange 2000 Server or Exchange Server 5.5 server to forward mail to an Internet address that represents a mobile device. Obvious security concerns accompany the reliance on such a process, and Microsoft provides instructions for how to limit your exposure—see "Important Information for IT Managers" on the MOMM download page.
To test MOMM, you'll need a mobile device that has an SMTP address. If you don't have a mobile device, I recommend another free download: the Microsoft Mobile Explorer (MME) Emulator, which I discussed in "Mobile and Wireless Emulators," June 2001. You can download MME from http://www.microsoft.com/mobile/phones/mme. (I used the MME Emulator for a portion of my testing.) If you don't have a server for testing, you can enable a VMware virtual server; for instructions, see the Web-exclusive sidebar "Setting Up a Virtual Server" at http://www.win2000mag.com, InstantDoc ID 22246. Now, let's see what MOMM can do.
Putting MOMM to the Test
The MOMM installation process prompts you for a mail profile—and the utility is touchy about which type of mail profile. To examine the profiles available on the client, open Windows 2000's Control Panel Mail applet and click Show Profiles. MOMM requires a profile that contains only an Exchange account. The profile can't contain any .pst files. To check whether a profile contains a .pst file, select the profile and click Properties. If the listed services include Personal Folders, then the profile includes one or more .pst files and won't work with MOMM. If necessary, you can create a new profile for MOMM's use. Click Cancel to close the Properties dialog box of the profile you inspected. Select Add to create a new profile, and follow the prompts to create a profile that uses only Exchange.
Now, you need to configure Outlook so that you can select the profile at startup. To do so, select Tools, Options to access the Options dialog box. Go to the Mail Services tab and click the Prompt for a profile to be used radio button under Startup Settings. Click OK to close the Options dialog box and select File, Exit, Log Off to shut down Outlook.
After you complete the MOMM installation, the utility appears as a small telephone icon in the system tray (in which Task Manager resides). Double-clicking the icon produces a display that resembles a Web page, as Figure 1, page 130, shows. The Overview section verifies that MOMM is working. If you've selected the option for laptop installation, you can click Turn On Delivery to establish a connection with the server.
To customize the way MOMM delivers messages, click My Profiles in the upper left corner. (MOMM's profiles aren't the same as the mail profiles that I discussed earlier.) Each of the four MOMM profiles—Work, Home, Out of Office, and Do Not Disturb—lets you customize the length of time that the software holds messages before delivery, the priority of mail that the software delivers, and the function of Outlook's reminder messages. Each profile also lets you configure the software to forward any mail messages copied to the Mobile Inbox folder (which MOMM creates as a subfolder of your regular Exchange Inbox). This capability lets you use Outlook's Rules Wizard to customize message delivery in ways beyond MOMM's scope.
To further customize message delivery, click My Device to access an amazing feature called IntelliShrink. This feature eliminates unnecessary items from messages. Determining what constitutes an "unnecessary" item is up to you: You can, for example, remove excess white space, abbreviate long words, remove all spaces and standard punctuation, and remove vowels. You can also choose to break long messages into bite-sized chunks.
To choose how many messages you want to forward—or to reset that number—click Message Limits (also under My Device). This feature lets you avoid excess message-forwarding charges. To determine how the software identifies senders and to forward phone numbers along with messages, click Sender Information under My Device.
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