One thing that I've always understood, but always been frustrated by is corporate firewalls where they block both inbound and outbound ports.

Yeah, I know the reasons, stopping unauthorised software having freedom to do what it pleases and that's a good thing.. but sometimes things go a little too far for convenience.  Take incoming email for example, good old port 110 is most often used and is one of the first to be blocked by most sys admin's.  Again, sort of understandable but annoying if you want to check your own email account from work, you have to use some usually awful webmail system and keep refreshing it all the time.

Recently I've been doing a lot of work with web services and this got me thinking, you can do pretty much anything on port 80, why not just write services that do all that naughty stuff and host that on the outside world, then write small app's sitting inside your organisations firewall that just talk to the service.. and it works!

I wrote a small web service that had one method, GetMessageCount which took a mailserver, port, username and password as parameters and returned the number of messages in that inbox.  Simple stuff when you have a pop3 library to hand.

Then I wrote a small tray application that called this web service every 10 minutes with appropriate mailbox details and displayed a message balloon if the number of mail messages increased over previous checks, therefore prompting me to login to my webmail and take action.

So, if you want simple status reports, or perhaps even more complex systems, as long as you've got some programming interface to it why not wrap it up in a service and write yourself some desktop app's to interact with it.  Until your company implements content filtering as well as port filtering you'll be happy!