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Question

What is the most straightforward way to automatically forward emails from Outlook or Gmail to another web service when auto forwarding has been disabled in those respective email services?

Context

Consolidating multiple email address cloud services into a single inbox

One solution to managing multiple emails addresses from different providers (e.g. school, work, consulting clients) is to have all the email addresses automatically forward to a single cloud inbox (e.g. Gmail) and then either respond from a single email address or use a feature similar to Gmail's "Send As" feature to respond from the appropriate email.

Disabled Autoforwarding Blanket

Often, administrators will disable autoforwarding in cloud services to prevent malicious actors from getting inside the system and autoforwarding emails without a given user's knowledge.

While this may be a helpful blanket security measure, it prevents the above consolidated inbox automation for benevolent actors, even when that is not the intention of the administrator and/or the administrator gives explicit approval that autoforwarding is ok if one can find a work around (e.g. the admin won't make an exception on the cloud software to allow for forwarding on one's account).

Inadequacy of an aggregate inbox client

Aggregating inboxes on an email client such as Thunderbird or Outlook desktop or mobile clients are inadequate. It requires reconfiguration of every email for every client device (vs. just a single email account with all emails). It also prevents one from using a web only client to handle one's email and prevents the associated tooling that comes with such clients.

Potential solutions

Since an email desktop or mobile client can pull emails from a email web server that disables forwarding, I assume there could be a straightforward way of setting up an email client that can connect to the web service(s) which disable forwarding, regularly poll that service for new messages, and then automatically forward those messages to the new inbox.

  • Is this the most straightforward method?
  • Does this ability exist on free software such as Thunderbird that can automatically be run locally on desktop (less than ideal)?
  • Is there a SaaS or opensource project that can be deployed to a cloud service to automatically do this (preferable)?

Suggestions appreciated!

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What are the email web servers, web services, and cloud services you mentioned? In addition, how do you disable auto forwarding?

If you are setting up to block forwarding mail through the exchange server, as far as I know, as an admin, you can use mail flow rules to detect and block automatically forwarded messages to external recipients, or use remote domain to allow or block automatic email forwarding to some or all external domains. Maybe you can find some good suggestions by setting some filtering conditions from these methods:

Mail flow rules (transport rules) in Exchange Online

Remote domains in Exchange Online

If you disable auto forwarding through other methods, such as some gmail settings, it is suggested that you could post in Gmail related forums for more professional help.

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  • Just checking in to see if above information was helpful. If you have any further updates on this issue, please feel free to post back. If you think my reply is helpful to you, please remember to mark it as an answer. Warm thanks.
    – Christy
    Jun 11, 2021 at 6:16
  • Hi Christy, this doesn't answer my question. In the situation I described, I'm trying to set up forwarding as a user of the email address (i.e. a client of the email server without admin access to the server). Therefore, I don't have admin access to enable forwarding rules that have been disabled by the admin.
    – ZenBalance
    Jun 16, 2021 at 21:24
  • According to your description, I understand that you seem to want to set forwarding permission without using administrator identity. Administrators limit automatic forwarding for the sake of the security of the organization. It seems impossible to bypass this setting for forwarding on the outlook client.
    – Christy
    Jun 22, 2021 at 9:18

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