Outlook 2007 and VPN connection?

Question

Is it possible to have only outlook use a VPN connection? Rest of internet traffic flowing through normal gateway?

Answer 1

What you're asking for is called "split tunneling", and means having two open network connections at the same time. This is considered to be a major security risk, since one unsecured network can then let the hacker through to the other network. This is why some VPN servers do not allow it, but if this is your case you can still get around it by using the VPN in a virtual machine (so the VM is blocked, and not you).

In most cases, for the VPN to allow split tunneling, you should do the following under XP:

1. Right click My Network Places on the desktop and click Properties.
2. Right click the VPN client connection in the Network Connections window and click Properties.
3. Click the Networking tab, then on the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) entry and then he Properties button.
4. On the General tab of the Properties dialog box, click the Advanced button.
5. On the General tab of the Advanced dialog box, uncheck "Use Default Gateway on Remote Network" option and click OK.

This means that all of your traffic (HTML etc.) will no longer be going automatically through the VPN network. But you can still refer to IP addresses on the VPN network, for example the Outlook mail server (and can modify your hosts file to refer to it by name).
After this, you might still need to set up a routing table. See this article for instructions.