Emailing....and slaying the Google monster

As some of you know, I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to emails. For a while now, I've used Google Applications for emails for 5 of my personal domains and fetching email from my other email accounts at AOL, Yahoo and Hotmail. However, I've started to get a bit wary of Google. The webmail interface is getting more flaky and unreliable. I also didn't like the way Gmail seems to suck up information about everything I do, its getting a bit creepy. Google Apps seems to work fine, except for the ability to sync contacts from a pc or laptop.

So, heres what I did, I moved my domains over to Fastmail ($39 a year), with the facility to fetch emails from my other accounts at AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo, so that's emails covered. Then I used my Hotmail account for calendaring and contacts with the activesync protocol. So now I have 3 way sync for contacts - on the web, on the laptop via Windows Live Mail email client and the HTC, and so far, its all working well. I could of course buy Exchange email hosting to cover emails, contacts, notes and calendar, but its far too expensive for my needs - £10 monthly from Heart Internet or $7.95 a month from Polarismail compared to $39 annually at Fastmail.

Somehow it seems nice to have control over my emails again rather than Google molesting them and goodness knows what else.

Office 365, about 4.90 a month (VAT included) for full hosted exchange account with 25GB of storage Rob, direct from Microsoft, pretty hard to beat when you get all the Exchange functionality included.

Microsoft don't feck about with your content either, plus you get some webspace from them as well and the Lync communication platform which is far too invisible right now, it is truly awesome, hope it catches on or gets some integration with Skype.

Ok it's more expensive than what you are paying, but it's FULL Exchange and very very stable and incredibly cheap.

Thats cheap, got any links? The one stumbling block so far for me is the ability to host 5 domains in one account - Heart Internet say no, only 1 domain can be used with their Exchange package.

Edit: Found all the info I need http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/hh416765.aspx

Very tempting!

It allows you to transfer in your DNS then control it on Microsoft's cloud servers, the multiple domain thing is a bit complex to work out but it does allow it, obviously only one of them is a sending domain at any one time.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/online-software.aspx#fbid=15xW_i7w930

I have one of my domains hosted on 365 and it has been great so far.

By the way, we are in the process of helping the husband of one of our support staff to set up a multiple domain Office 365 account, so it is likely I will know a lot more about that in a week or so's time, I did check and it is possible.

Cool, thanks for that.

Just opened a 30-day trial account with Office 365, managed to get one of my domains working quite happily. Admin functions seem quite straight-forward, configuration for my HTC was an absolute doddle, and I would assume if I was to have Outlook on my laptop, that would be a walk in the park too.

What is becoming obvious is that Office 365 will cost a bit - £4.90 a month, but I will need a copy of Outlook to get the best out of the product - Outlook on Amazon starts at £70-odd. Yes I realise there is the Outlook web login, but this is a slimmed down version of the full Outlook product. I'm starting to think I'll stick with my current set-up Fastmail for email and Hotmail for contacts & calendars, until some serious money comes in from somewhere!

To stop the Iluminati keeping tabs on you!!!!

Okay, kidding.. I have three email addressees I use, Hotmail, Gmail and a Yahoo email. I have them because I was using Hotmail for years, Yahoo I needed for Yahoo Messenger and Gmail I needed for Google stuff (Android, Google+ and what not). I also ad a few throwaway email addresses over the years like the ones ISP's seem to force you into. I would only use them to collect spam, signing up for various websites and what not.

In fact, when I switched to Hotmail I had an old FreeUK account (they were my old ISP) and it got about 70 spam emails per day! They had a really bad spam filtering system and everything just hit my inbox. In the end I changed my password there to something I cannot remember and never bothered logging back in.. I am sure they deleted that account after my not signing in and my inbox hitting a few Gigs worth of spam

3 e-mail addies, and that's it............

even when some scally flooded one of them with spam.............

As much as I love Fastmail (used them on and off for over 6 years), they still won't bring in Contacts or Calendaring. If they did, it would be an awesome service to rival Exchange.

As for sync between laptop and HTC how are you accessing emails on both devices?

You should be able to connect with Outlook 2003 if you have an old copy lying around, Office 365 does support IMAP and POP http://community.office365.com/en-u...pop-and-imap-connections-to-outlook-2003.aspx

It should also be possible to use a free email client like Zimbra Desktop via IMAP and SMTP interface, I'll have a look tonight to see if I can find some guidance on doing this.

I actually have about 60% of the code completed that I would need to write a full exchange email client, been working on it for a while for an exchange mail queue monitor for a CRM system, might be something I will write at some point, one tends to forget that Outlook costs money, I've been spoiled by over a decade of subscription to the Microsoft Action Pack for Partners, I've always just had all this stuff

Outlook 2003 has serious issues with W7 as I found out a few months ago - and apart from that this Office 365 will only sync with Office 2007 upwards, according to the help articles. I'm not a great fan of Zimbra, have tried it in the past, very slow and cumbersome, it needs more work. Evolution supports Exchange, maybe thats worth a try.

How ironic that Office 365 has IMAP, but the consumer free webmails don't. Microsoft will probably never allow IMAP (of which I think is the better of the two out of pop/imap) for Hotmail/Live as it has to protect its own ActiveSync service which they've heavily invested in.

What would be perfect if Thunderbird supported Exchange.

I went for the Microsoft Action Pack back in 2003, it was a software heaven. Can't afford it now though.

Or just give in to the Google bandwagon...

Just tried Zimbra this morning, you would have had problems with the Calendering anyway as it's local and not using the Exchange Store which negates the point somewhat.

Had a look at the Outlook Web Access again the morning and while it's not full Outlook it's getting really really close these days there is not much missing.

Regards the action pack I had it from about 1997 or 98 onwards till I shut down in 2009, at 300 odd quid a year it was great value but these days you have to have completed various online Microsoft "trainings" before they let you buy it, my last training expired the other year so I would have to do a new one. However I just got what was my old product through the Microsoft Partner ISV Silver Competency tests the other day (my employers own my product now) so we are back to being the equivalent of the old Microsoft Certified Partners and get access to ridiculous quantities of licences again, for example 25 licences for Office 2010 same for Windows 7 and so on.

I'm surprised no one has done an alternative exchange client as the full EWS interface is freely available for Exchange and you can basically do anything with the Exchange Store via that interface.