Exchange Hosting

A couple years ago I picked up a  Samsung  i730 smartphone, and to unleash its potential to replace my RIM pager I ended up grabbing a domain and exchange hosting.

As typical I grabbed the domain from Godaddy.com  and directed it to DSLExtreme.com's DNS servers so they could provide me with an exchange account.

This has worked like a champ for quite some time, however DSLExtreme charges $9.95/month for the exchange hosting.  Not to bad, but seems a bit expensive for the level of usage I get out of it.

I tried moving to Google Apps a few weeks ago without full success - every thing moved over just by creating CNAME pointers via GoDaddy's "Total DNS Control" tool.  Big props to Google for very good directions specific to GoDaddy in their help section (don't forget the "." on the end of the MX records!). 

I like this approach because doing granular MX records it leaves the rest of the domain at my control (should I want to host a website on the domain or any subdomains).

Biggest problem with Google Apps was sending and receiving messages from Windows Mobile.  The pop access works, however I had to search a bit to keep the messages in my inbox for more than one "send and receive".  Then once that was working the conversation threading feature caused significant cluttering of my inbox (on Windows Mobile).  Additionally polling for POP access impacts the battery life noticeably.

Last week I took a little time to review this setup one more time.  This time I utilized a hybrid approach between Google Apps and also added exchange hosting.  I ended up utilizing mail2web's personal exchange hosting for ActiveSync push to WindowsMobile.  mail2web's personal exchange hosting costs $1.99/month

In Google Apps I created a forwarding rule to forward all mail to me@mydomain, and in mail2web I set my reply-to address to me@mydomain.

This is working very well, however I still need to automate the syncing of calendar and contacts back up to google.