High Priority Emails? Not on the iPhone!

Since switching over to the iPhone, I have noticed some features that I sorely miss from my Blackberry.  None of them deal breakers for me though but still quite annoying.  One that came up the other day was the iPhone’s lack of support for Level 1 notifications and High Priority emails.  With my Blackberry, I could designate a list of senders that when receiving an email from, would cause my Blackberry to vibrate or otherwise alert me.  Same for messages designated as ! High Priority.  iPhone treats all mail equally.  However, it does treat SMS messages differently.  SMS Text me and my iPhone immediately alerts me.

To mimic the desired Blackberry behavior on the iPhone, I turned to Outlook Rules.  I created a pretty simple server side rule. When a message comes in marked as High Importance, forward the message to my Cell Provider’s Email to SMS gateway address. (Check here for a Cell Provider list).  The end result is a nice SMS Buzz on my iPhone whenever someone sends me a High Priority email.  Of course you can also go even more granular on the rule if desired.  Since this is a Server Side Rule, it is processed on the Exchange Server and Outlook does not need to be running.