Forward email to Blackberry’s with Exchange without BES
August 1, 2007What? Yep, you heard it right. And I never really thought about it, but it makes total sense. I got this from SearchExchange… it’s so simple!
Here is a solution that is very easy to implement and does not require any knowledge or possession of a BlackBerry server. To do this, you only need to have an email-enabled BlackBerry device. (If your device is not yet email-enabled, you can probably arrange this at no extra charge through your handheld/wireless provider).
Once you’ve configured an address for your handheld device, such as JTest@myhandheldprovider.com, create a contact in Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC) that corresponds to that address.
After the Exchange Recipient Update Service (RUS) has run its magic and you can now “see” this contact in your address book, configure forwarding of messages from the user’s regular mailbox to the new BlackBerry contact. You will do this on the Exchange General tab of the user account. You can also set this so that messages are sent to both the BlackBerry and the mailbox, rather than just to the BlackBerry without leaving a copy in the mailbox.
Messages sent to the BlackBerry using this technique will appear as the original message, preserving all sender information. The messages will not appear as having been forwarded by another account.
As a final step, you may want to hide the BlackBerry contact from the address book, using the Exchange Advanced tab of the contact, so that regular users do not see it in the address book.
So what about the reply to address when they reply with the Blackberry? Maybe they can set the device to reply with the email address on the Exchange server??