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My employer, a university, just switched me to Microsoft Exchange from a POP3 based email server. They've disabled forwarding and POP3 access but allow IMAP access. In addition they have a very small disk quota.

I've used Gmail for years with lots of filters to access all my accounts. With 85GB of space, I've got lots of old email stored, and I search them often. Now I'm stuck.

The solution I envision is a personal mail server running in my office (on Windows XP or Linux) which accesses my email from Exchange via IMAP, and then allows Gmail to get it via POP3, or perhaps just forwards it. It would at some point also delete the email from the Exchange server so I don't go over my disk quota.

I won't be using Exchange's non-email functionality.

This program would also take mail sent by Gmail via SMTP and forward it on to Exchange via IMAP.

Does anything like this exist?

I know I could also use IMAP client software which could consolidate both accounts into a single client, but could I have access to all my emails from any browser and my Android phone?

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You can have your exchange email forwarded to your gmail account. Just log into Outlook Web Access and setup a rule to forward all your mail to your gmail account.

To solve the problem of sending mail, I suggest making a second gmail account for sending only. I'm not sure about android phone, but you will either have to a) setup the account's reply-to address with the exchange's address, or b) setup the replay-to address on the phone.

And with Gmail, it is easy to link the accounts and send mail as a different account, using that account's reply-to address.

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  • Is there a way to use wildcards in the rules? I'm trying to figure out a global rule. I suppose I want to redirect rather than forward. This at least lets me read and save my email. If I want to reply, I have to log in to exchange. I think that the problem with using a reply-to address different from the sending address is that many email accounts will block this as spam.
    – RyanN
    Jul 20, 2011 at 13:14
  • Humm, I'm not too familiar with MX protocol. But I can see the admins not doing this. It does nothing for security and more than likely they will use the built in SPAM filters, which use a more complicated algorithm. I've worked with the state military here and I know for sure not even their Exchange server blocks these legit emails. So I'm going to assume, if the state military doesn't feel that cuts SPAM, then your university won't either.
    – surfasb
    Jul 20, 2011 at 16:28
  • Thanks, but after a lot of research, I installed thunderbird on my pc. i set it up to subscribe to my Exchange server account, and my "work" tag/filter in gmail. Not ideal, but it's the best I can do. As to using wildcards in filters, this page: Using wildcard characters to refine filters may help getting it working.
    – RyanN
    Aug 12, 2011 at 19:23
  • Five years later, I'm in the same situation as OP. In addition, my university's email forwarding is infamously spotty (they warn in their tutorial about forwarding that messages send to Gmail, Yahoo!, etc. will likely be partially lost, as weird and unacceptable as that is). Has any better solution shown up, to your knowledge, in the intervening time?
    – jdc
    Aug 14, 2016 at 19:48

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