Best Methods for Mirroring Email Accounts Across Different Platforms

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We have enterprise users that want to try out an online mail provider (such as GMail or MS Exchange Online) for a trial period, but would also like their local mail (Lotus Notes) to remain synched with the trial account so that they can compare and contrast and maintain their normal work routine both in the cloud account and in their 'local' accounts.

What is the best way to achieve a seamless 'mirroring' of both email accounts for each user so that

  • emails delivered to either account will appear in the inbox of both accounts
  • emails sent from either account appear in on both accounts in the 'sent items' folder
  • emails moved from one folder to another in one account will automatically reflect on the other account (this is a 'nice-to-have').

The key word here is seamless. Emails sent/delivered to/from either account should retain their original senders and sendees.

Is this even possible?

Best Answer

Seamless is only going to happen if you can synchronize email between Gmail and Domino and regardless of what's possible, a two-way synchronization is - at best - going to be problematic. What happens when one of your test users tries to move a message to a folder on Gmail and simultaneously moves the same message to another folder in your usual email client? (What are you using as a client for Notes, BTW?)

If you were talking about Gmail and Outlook/Exchange, you can use Outlook as an IMAP client to Gmail and do the synchronization that way. But going the other way, I have never heard of Gmail being used as an IMAP client, talking to your Domino server.

If it were me, to avoid any risk of someone's "real" email getting screwed up, I would simply forward a copy of all their incoming mail to a GMail account and let them work with the copy. I'd set a reply-to address on the GMail account so that mail comes back to your servers (and a copy sent out to Gmail again), set up a signature block to announce the testing, and configure Gmail to CC: outgoing messages back to your server. It's kludgy, but for testing purposes, I'd rather be safe.

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