Law Students

MobileMe & Hosted Exchange

By Athar Khan

In search of the perfect email (as well as contact and task management) solution, I tried out MobileMe. I found MobileMe to be incredibly slow — even with no email in a folder, it would take at least 5 seconds to refresh a page. Plainly unacceptable. Another huge drawback to MobileMe was that it can sync a few commonly used Contacts fields from Outlook rather than all fields.

So, I tried out Hosted Exchange. GoDaddy’s Hosted Exchange solution was nice but it turns out that I wont be able to use that either. First, the service was incredibly slow. It took anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes for a Send/Receive operation to complete on an *empty* folder! I can only imagine what the performance will be like when the folders start getting populated with emails. Another issue was that the iPhone can only handle one Exchange account and I already have my work account set up for that. I tried to access Hosted Exchange via IMAP but then found out that any changes made via IMAP are not propagated to the Exchange Mailbox. For example, if you delete an item via IMAP, it remains as is if you view the account from Exchange.

So, it’s back to a convoluted setup of Gmail via POP and IMAP synchronizing between computers via Plaxo.

Full post as published by Atharkhan on January 14, 2009 (boomark / email).