Remote Access

Nukem

Hello,

Have an issue with IT in work, they are fooking me around and won't give me remote access to my e-mails from anywhere bar my office. I spend quite a bit of time away from my desk and a blackberry is not an option. Can access PC's from onsite but not mobiles:(

Is there anyway of getting into my e-mails. They have a webmail in work that allows other people to access my e-mails if i give them my password. Is there anyway i can do it myself from another PC?

Tried the IP address that the webmail uses but no go!

Cheers in advance

stakey

An office firewall may prevent you from doing this, but install 'logmein' on the work PC and you should be able to access it. I used it in my last job. But as i said they may firewall such access...

see www.logmein.com

mick.fr

Well if your manager and the IT dpt are not allowing you to access your email outside of the office, this is probably not a good idea to force your way in.

I am not sure to understand your statement as well :
"They have a webmail in work that allows other people to access my e-mails if i give them my password"
Do you mean they will give you webmail access if you give them your password ?

Allowing employees to access remote ressources has only one goal : Productivity. So you should be happy not to be allowed, then you do not have to work from home.

Now setting up such access by installing a "back door" is certainly against your IT company's policy (If they have any) and you are taking a big risk to introduce other things in to the company's network because there will be no endpoint checks.

This is problably not a good idea in my opinion.

stakey

but if the rule ain't there backdoor it is! you're just being productive

far2gud

I would advise against this, it may seem like a good solution but could present a security risk and or be in violation of your IT Policy.

Surely your IT Department can provide you with secure means to access your internal network. Most companys use vpn software to provide this type of connection.

seamus

Bring it up with your department head or the head of I.T.

Any well run I.T. department will strongly control access from the Internet, and the fact that the monkeys and the low-level management are telling you to feck off is a good indicator that they have a decent policy in place.
Or it may be an indicator that they're too lazy to set something up.

The basics are:
If you can access your email from outside of work, then somebody else can too.
If somebody else can access your email, there's a whole pile of other stuff they can access too.

In order to provide access to your mail with minimum risk to the network, they would need to install a secure VPN gateway. They would also need to supply you with a default-imaged latop to ensure that it's secure and conforms to company policy. Your own machine at home wouldn't suffice. This is all costly, and if you're the only person who needs this, it's a lot of money for one person. Even setting up access to your email only would be costly.

A blackberry really is the best option here IMO. You run the risk in that your mail may be sent and seen by a third party on their server, but it's quite minimised IMO. Is there any good reason why they won't give you one?

Capt'n Midnight

One option is to setup an external email address and have a rule in outlook or whatever that forwards email to the external account. The big thing to sort out is that the external account uses your internal email address as the default reply address and that a copy of anything you send gets cc'd back in to the work account, you will need to modify the rule to not send that stuff back out again or you get a loop.


You'll need to check with IT that it doesn't affect the companies policy, and the difficulty of capturing email you send from an external account may be a show stopper. (for legal reasons)

seamus

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

One option is to setup an external email address and have a rule in outlook or whatever that forwards email to the external account. The big thing to sort out is that the external account uses your internal email address as the default reply address and that a copy of anything you send gets cc'd back in to the work account, you will need to modify the rule to not send that stuff back out again or you get a loop.


You'll need to check with IT that it doesn't affect the companies policy, and the difficulty of capturing email you send from an external account may be a show stopper. (for legal reasons)

The only problem really with this is that it may be a breach of Data Protection. Using a Gmail or Hotmail account (for example) means that you're passing your information to a third party. If your email contains client or supplier information, then you put the business at risk by forwarding the mail to a third party email provider.

Nukem

Jaysus all i want to di is use my work e-mails more!
I'll just have to grit my teeth and camp outside IT until they do. Cheers guys;)

Capt'n Midnight

seamus wrote:

The only problem really with this is that it may be a breach of Data Protection. Using a Gmail or Hotmail account (for example) means that you're passing your information to a third party. If your email contains client or supplier information, then you put the business at risk by forwarding the mail to a third party email provider.

Interesting point.

You could use a commercial ISP's email. Then again what's technically possible may not be OK with the companies IT policy. And it's their email not the OP's

Saruman

What webmail adress are you using? Ok let me rephrase that as you should not be posting that info
Is it exchange they use? So is it outlook web access? for instance you might put into a browser in work http://192.168.0.100/exchange or you may use a dns name like http://sbsserver/exchange
If thats what you are using, maybe... just maybe its already set up for external acess. In which case you need your firewalls public IP address. so go to www.whatismyip.com and then try that ipaddress with /exchange on the end i.e http://62.66.254.12/exchange
Worth a shot.