You don't have to be at your office to use Microsoft Exchange with your Microsoft Mail Postoffice. When working at home or on the road, you can read and reply to mail offline. Then, if you have a modem and access to a telephone line, you can establish a remote connection to your organization's network or to your computer, and send and receive electronic mail as if you were at your office.
The Microsoft Exchange client is designed to provide the benefits of remote mail, without requiring any additional client software or a special gateway to dial into. When you are at a remote site, you can easily send and receive electronic mail with the following features:
Using the built-in Microsoft Mail drivers, you can dial into your network and preview just the headers of your new mail messages. That is, you can see who has sent you mail, what its subject is, how large the message is, and the estimated time it will take to download it. This saves you time when you are away from the office and don't want to download unnecessary files.
After the headers are retrieved, you can mark which messages you would like to download, and which you would like to delete without downloading. You can either stay on the line after retrieving the headers, or make another call later to download selected messages.
Rather than using a specialized electronic mail gateway for remote mail, Microsoft Exchange relies on the Dial-Up Networking tool that's built into Windows 95. Since Windows 95 supports standard network protocols, such as TCP/IP, IPX/SPX, and NetBEUI, you can use Dial-Up Networking to dial into many types of remote access servers to access your postoffice. The types of remote access servers you can dial into include another computer running Windows 95, Microsoft Windows NT™ Server, Shiva™ LanRover™, Novell NetWare, and others. For details, see the Windows 95 Resource Kit.
You can compose mail while offline, that is, while you're not connected to a network. For example, while you're at the airport, you can download new messages, read your mail and compose replies, and then send your responses automatically the next time you dial in from the hotel. Messages are queued up in the outbox until the next time you're connected to the appropriate mail service.
You can dial in as needed to retrieve mail remotely, or you can set up scheduled connections to dial in at a specific time, or on a regular basis (for example, if you work permanently at a remote site).
Microsoft Exchange uses the Windows 95 TAPI facilities to dial and retrieve mail remotely, which allows applications to share a modem. For example, you can set your modem to listen for incoming faxes, but still make a call to get your electronic mail — TAPI effectively arbitrates modem resources among applications. Microsoft Exchange also uses the TAPI Dialing Properties tool to easily handle multiple locations, hotel dialing prefixes, and credit card calls. For more information about Dialing Properties, see the Windows 95 Resource Kit.