‘New Mail’ Notifications for Secondary ‘Additional Outlook Mailbox Folders’ – Custom Application

Most of the IT-Support teams have a dedicated ‘Secondary Mailbox Folder’ configured in their MS-Outlook, to track all the mails related to their divisions/applications/operations. All of the members of the support team have the ‘Mailbox Folder’ configured in their respective desktop.

If you don’t know, what’s a secondary mailbox is, the below figure will help! These are secondary mail box folders added to your primary email account. This may be a mail box shared among a group of people.

 

 

But one problem with the ‘Secondary Mailbox’ with MS-Outlook is that, ‘New Mail’ notification will not be triggered for it. This means, if any new mail arrives in your ‘Secondary Mail Box’, The traditional ‘Outlook New Mail’ notification will not pop up. So support team have a hard time to regularly check their ‘Secondary Mailboxes’ for any new mails. Failure to do so, may result in an SLA miss.

 

Here it is, where Microsoft says about this:

Outlook will not support native ‘New E-Mail’ notifications, for ‘Additional Secondary mail box folders’ added to your primary outlook account, unless you are the owner of your mailbox.

You can find more Details here:

www.msoutlook.info

MSDN

 

Yes there are dirty workarounds. For e.g. Setting up a custom outlook rule to auto forward all mails arrived at the ‘Secondary Mailbox’ to your Inbox. As Inbox mails will give you ‘New Mail’ notifications this will work, but with setting up the custom rule hack.

 

We were searching for a more straightforward way to handle this shortcoming.

 

The result is a ‘.NET windows application’, that will trigger ‘New Mail’ notifications for any configured under ‘Outlook Mailbox’ folders. No matter whether it’s a regular Inbox or an additional secondary mailbox, the application will pop-up ‘new mail’ notifications, if you prefer.

 

The tool targeted towards various IT Support teams (Maintenance), who have a designated shared ‘Outlook Mailbox Folder’ for their division/Applications and have to respond to those group mails in a timely manner.

 

1. Download

Download Application (EXE) with C# Source

Prerequisites:

• .NET Framework 2.0 Installed

• Microsoft Office Outlook installed and started 

 

 

 

2. Using the custom tool

 

Note:  This tool is a generic one, so you can enlist any of your mail boxes (Primary and any number of additional secondary mail boxes) for new mail notifications.

 

2.1 Download (Source and EXE) from the above link and Unzip it

 

2.2 Double click OutlookMailboxFolderNotify.exe

 

2.3 Select the mail boxes from the list, for which you would like to receive ‘New Mail’ Notifications

 

      Note: Here you  can select your Additional ‘Secondary Mailboxes’, along with Primary Mailbox if needed.

 

2.4 Click button ‘Start Notifications on New Mails’

 

 

 

2.5 Minimize the form to the system Try (using ‘Minimize To System Tray’ button)

 

Note: From now onwards you will get ‘New Mail’ notifications for the selected mailboxes.

 

 

 

2.6 To stop receiving notifications/Exiting the application.

                       

                        • Double click on the Notify icon in the ‘System Tray’

• Click the button ‘Stop Notifications’ – To stop notifications.

• Click the button ‘Exit Application’ – To stop notifications and exit the application.

 

 

3. Known Limitations

 

If network connection is lost or ‘Microsoft Exchange Server’ has got disconnected and back online, you have to restart the application once again. (Using the ‘Reset!’ button)