In Part 1, I talked about the problems with POP3 and IMAP email and suggested trying a Hosted Exchange account to get around them. In Part 2, I’ll cover their advantages.
The advantages are plenty. When you access your email from your UMPC, it’s all there, including emails you sent from another computer. Emails you read already are marked as read and any you’ve sorted or filed are filed just as you left them. And your email is safe on the server. Should your hard drive crash on one of your PCs, you won’t lose a single message. There are some other benefits, too. You can access your email from any computer anywhere using Outlook Web Access, which closely resembles the interface of Outlook 2003. If you have a Windows Mobile PDA or Smartphone, you can sync it directly to the Exchange server, without having to connect it to a PC. Depending on your cellular service provider, you can even get “push email”, where your email is synced to your PDA as soon as it arrives. No more Blackberry envy! Exchange will store and sync more than just email, too. It also supports your contacts, calendar, tasks, and notes. And if you don’t happen to have Outlook, many hosted Exchange providers will give you a copy for free when you sign up for their service.
If you happen to be using Outlook 2007 beta, there is another advantage of a hosted Exchange account. The newest version of Outlook supports RSS feeds and lets you read your favorite RSS feeds within Outlook. Each message in a particular feed is treated more or less the same as any email message. That means, of course, that the RSS messages are stored on the server and thus available on any computer you use to access your account, just like any other email messages. There is no longer any need to sign up to an online RSS aggregator or a service that synchronizes your RSS messages across computers – Exchange handles it all for you.
There are other options for email that are better than POP3, but they just don’t hold up to Exchange. Another standard email protocol called IMAP4 allows you to store your email on a server, but it’s more difficult to use than Exchange. For instance, you cannot simply delete emails once you’ve read them, you must mark them for deletion and then delete them later. It also doesn’t support calendar, notes, or tasks. Web-based services like GMail or Hotmail have the advantage of being free, but you must be online when you access them.
There are several hosted Exchange service providers around and a simple Google search on “hosted Exchange” should find most of them. For the small amount of money it costs, a hosted Exchange account will simplify and improve your email process and, if you’re like me, after awhile you’ll swear to yourself that you’ll never go back to POP3!
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Nice post series, Perry! I enjoyed it!
One advantage of IMAP4 though, is that it is more widely supported than exchange. I chose IMAP4 over exchange for it’s openess.
Yes, there is no question that IMAP is more widely supported. You can find all sorts of different email servers and clients that use it, while Microsoft’s MAPI protocol are pretty much limited to Exchange and their own clients.
I really wanted IMAP4 to be the answer! My email provider supported it as did my email client so I gave it a try and stuck with it for quite awhile. But its limitations soon made it very apparent that it just wasn’t up to the task of handling my email. Of course, your experiences may be different as may be your requirements for email. I certainly wouldn’t come down on anyone who uses IMAP and likes it, it just didn’t work for me and I’ve found that the features you get from Exchange are well worth the price to pay for the monthly service. Most of the various hosting services out there are under US$10 a month, so the cost is pretty reasonable, in my opinion.
Nice series Perry. One more thing about IMAP (and I’ve been working in that ebvironment for 6 years now) is that it makes the use of many Outlook add-ins and other tools that work with Outlook data impossible. ClearContext IMS Pro is a good example. So is NEO Pro. Neither can work on an IMAP account store, making them interesting but unusable to me. Both of these tools support Exchange because the .ost file format is well-documented and better supported by Microsoft than IMAP.
001 394252…
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