Accessing web-mail on your iPhone
With the advent of one of the pioneers in cell phones, the iPhone, it has become extremely important for users to be connected on the move. Whether it is the budding reporter, or the suave businessman or even the super busy doctor, everyone is in need of constant updates and real time notification services. Basically everyone requires access to their mail account on their phones, in this case the iPhone. Connecting to your mail server can be a really cumbersome process and there are some really long and often not too rewarding methods of doing it. Below is mentioned a few methods of accessing your webmail from your iPhone.
Outlook Webmail Access (OWA)
Now Apple’s iPhone has some serious issues when it comes to accessing webmail from it. Most users get their webmail via Outlook Webmail Access (OWA) on Safari which is installed on it. Safari is just the web-browsing application used by Apple. OWA is the webmail client which works to retrieve emails from a person’s mail server. Now OWA is an intermittent application which is known to have connectivity issues. Hence although this works the question remains: for how long? Hence we need to see some alternative methods for accessing webmail.
Third Party gateway service
Now different brands of mail servers follow different protocols for information exchange. The most common protocols being IMAP and POP3. Popular mailing services may even use their own custom protocols. What mail2web.com does is convert the different protocols into one that is understood by the web client application installed on your iPhone. Thereby providing a real time availability of emails directly on your phone. This method is called email pushing. Email push is a widely used method to get not only emails but also calendar updates and other notifications directly on your phone as soon as it reaches your inbox.
ActiveSync and Microsoft Exchange
Big companies virtually run on Microsoft Exchange servers. Now Exchange has very recently authorized some phones to use this service via ActiveSync. Previously the best possible way was to use Microsoft Outlook from a computer. Then came Windows mobiles which allowed excellent connectivity to Exchange servers. Now for iPhones we have ActiveSync. Now setting up ActiveSync on your phone can both be extremely simple as well as super complicated based on the version of Exchange server you are planning to connect to. Initially keep in mind that if you want to access your mail on a company’s server then the company has to give you permissions to do so. Otherwise you will be blocked out. Active Sync normally uses OWA to connect to Exchange servers.
The difference between using Exchange server and POP3/IMAP services lies in the fact that Microsoft does not allow lots of features of the Exchange server to be available through POP3/IMAP. Amongst this falls the most important feature of Exchange server, that is public folders. This allows employees of a certain company to be in sync with each other and the company at large via updates and mails. One can even setup meetings and check the company’s schedules for conference bookings and other resources.
By Pete
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
ActiveSync is a real life saver if you ask me, I’m glad that it’s starting to smooth out some of the bumps that used to exist with this sort of thing. Anything that get my mail to me faster is a big plus in my book.
Is there any sort of security risk for your business or your phone being set up with these kinds of systems and connections. It just seems like something could go wrong somewhere and cause problems for a lot of people.
I wonder what would happen to a big company if their Microsoft exchange flopped out for a week… I bet they’d be in a situation where their communication would be so terrible that they would barely be able to function… I think it’s important to have a back up system in place but I don’t think that many places bother to do that…
I am really surprised that Apple let their system run so long with the issues that it had It seems like something they would want to resolve immediately to keep their fresh and advanced image unmarred
this post its very usefull thx!