Email Notification

Question

The company I work for has consultants that work off site. Because of policy we are not allowed to set up email forwarding so these users can receive their email. Obviously this is a problem as these users may miss important email. Can anyone recommend a way that we could inform these users they have email waiting for them?

Answer 1

If they have cell phones on their person you could send them an SMS. I'm not sure how you would hook up to that but you would want to have some kind of SMPP service from whichever provider you can find. With SMPP you can actually re-encode the email and send it that way. For users with Blackberries it wouldn't be too painful to read emails that way.

Answer 2

Could you set up a system to send them an email to let them know they have an email waiting for them? Similar to what banks do to let you know you should log on to your account, without sending any actual information in the email?

Answer 3

Whoever came up with this policy should be made responsible for coming up with a solution for the off-site consultants. Policies like this that are in conflict with technical reality should be re-evaluated; there is no harm in asking for an exception for a limited amount of time given the circumstances.

Note that any other solution amounts to an 'end run' around the policy, violating the spirit of the policy if not the letter of it as well. If the policy exists for 'security' reasons, then the 'security' experts will need to come up with an alternative. If you just bypass the policy and something goes wrong it could be very bad for all involved.

Answer 4

I would think that the best thing to do here is see if you can change the policy. If you cannot email your consultants due to some policy then it is the policy that is preventing you doing your job correctly, not a technical issue.

Answer 5

I'm sure these consultants have their own email accounts (be it through their consulting firm or personal). So just email them the necessary messages to those accounts.

Answer 6

Why can't you just send an email to their 'normal' email address?
If not, a phone call works and offers a good time to connect, chat and discuss status.

Answer 7

I fail to understand if the consultants are using your company email address or do they have their own email address which they use when conducting the consulting business with other company s.

I had a similar problem where I had to check emails when off site and this was a 24/7 support gig. I had to build a an app where my emails would be piped into a php scripts and sent as a sms and this script ran only 22h00 - 07h00 other wise it would use a normal forwarding to my email.

The other option, use cellphones which support pop3 mail protocol and they can be configure to check at intervals and download snapshot of the email....

sms script is very nice tool to have for a 24/7 support type of environment other wise I would recommend the second option(The cell phones)