However, with Redirect for Outlook, both the sender of the redirected message and the recipient (in the example above, that would be Denise and I, respectively) need to have Redirect for Outlook installed. That's because Redirect for Outlook does some funky stuff to make the redirect feature work.

If you take a look at Figure B, you'll see that Denise has hit the Redirect for Outlook button and is about to address the redirected message (she'll eventually type in my email address).

FIGURE B

There's a funky file attached. Click picture for a larger image.

You might notice that there's a funky RFOHeader.txt file attached to the message she's redirecting. This attachment is added by Redirect for Outlook and is a very creative hack.

You see, back in the old Eudora days, the way a redirect would work is the message headers would be falsified, making it look like a message sent to Denise and redirected to me was, actually, originally sent to me.

Unfortunately, in these days of heightened security, falsified headers are big no-nos in corporate email systems like Exchange. Here's how MAPILab explains it:

A user will be able to send messages from other person's address only if system administrator has given him a privilege to send messages from that address. Moreover, with Microsoft Exchange Server, no user can be authorized to send messages from any address, a list of specific addresses must be used.

So the workaround MAPILab came up with was to have the redirector machine send this little attachment to the redirectee machine. Both machines would be running Redirect for Outlook. The receiving machine would then see the attachment and when it's time to reply, would pull some metadata from the attachment to construct a proper reply back to the originating user.

Whew! It's a little annoying to have all those teeny RFOHeader.txt attachments flying around and you'll need to make sure your mail server doesn't gobble them up with the rest of of the attachments it might automatically filter and delete.

The feature does work -- and it gets around a challenging security bottleneck. If course, with anything that works around a security bottleneck, you need to keep an eye on things to be sure no one takes advantage of this new feature to create a security hole. I don't think we'll be seeing exploits here, but do keep your eyes open.

Final thoughts
This is a clean, well-written program. There are a number of features I haven't covered here, represented in an Options tab in the Outlook Options dialog. You can automatically redirect messages, redirect multiple messages, and more.

The program comes with a Windows Help file that is reasonably comprehensive, although it's a bit difficult to read. It's readily apparent that the authors are not natural English speakers and some of the text in the documentation is convoluted. You might need to re-read critical passages two or three times to figure out what they're saying.

On the other hand, since I can barely read and write one language, my hat's off to anyone who can create documentation in a language he or she doesn't naturally speak.