The advantage of monitoring one’s work e-mail from home is that there is a smaller bundle of goodies to go through first thing Monday.
God willing.
I’ve actually been trying an alternative for monitoring office mail. There are four options I’ve found, though I’ve only used the first three before:
- Outlook Native: VPN into the company and fire off Outlook.
Pro: Full-blown mail functionality and response.
Con: VPN connection is subject to glitches and has maximum-length timer. Outlook is a resource hog. VPN connection blocks me from my local network (for printing), not to mention CoH. - Outlook Web Access: Micro$oft’s web viewer for Outlook, visible for our company across the Web.
Pro: Just a browser window (albeit IE). Calendar access, etc.
Con: Doesn’t update folder mail counts well, requiring intervention to make sure I’m seeing everything. Kludgy web interface. Slow to use, very difficult (slow) to view history. - Forward key mail to home: Set up a rule to forward mail from my boss to my home account.
Pro: Minimum intervention on my part. Catches things that I at least need to pay a little attention to. Home e-mail (Thunderbird) is always up.
Con: Misses anything not following the rules. Most follow-ups require going into Options 1 or 2. - IMAP via Thunderbird: Use Thunderbird to access our IMAP mail server. Subscribe to the key folders I need to track.
Pro: Thunderbird is always up. Solid mail client power. All key e-mail received.
Con: Possibly miss stuff that routes to non-subscribed folders; have to update subscriptions if I modify my mail setup. IMAP folder subscriptions do not automatically update, as far as I can tell, requiring manual intervention (click on folder), which is annoying.
That last bit in #4 was part of what was bugging me this weekend. Otherwise, it worked perfect, and I was able to track some office problems near-normally with just my normal home e-mail client. Supposedly Thunderbird should do that, though, so I need to figure out where the problem is.
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It appears that there is a per-folder configuration for Thunderbird IMAP folder to “Check this folder for new mail.” I’m not sure why there’s not a global default for that, but I’m checking those off manually to see if that resolved the problem for me. If so, woot.
Setting the folders as designated seems to have done the trick. Bad interface choice (there should be a global option as well as a by-folder one).
(This is a test comment. Please ignore.)