4SmartPhone Hosted Exchange Mailboxes Mobilize Your Data

4SmartPhone provides hosted Exchange mailboxes for individuals or small and medium businesses. As we discussed on the Exchange Hosting page, a hosted Exchange mailbox offers lots of benefits for people who are mobile, or have multiple locations that they regularly work from. As you might guess from the name, 4SmartPhone not only works with desktop computers running Outlook, but also with devices running Windows Mobile, as well as assorted smartphones and other wireless devices. The benefits of this service are summed up nicely on their website:

Right now, this plan is a very reasonable $6.99/mo.

Note: It's not clear whether hosting services will be offering free versions of Outlook 2007, since Microsoft has changed the licensing model for Exchange 2007 in a way that could make this too costly.

Another nice thing about this service is that you can do a free trial to see how it works for you.

Using a 4SmartPhone Hosted Exchange Mailbox

I tried to use the same script on my computer that's running Outlook 2007 on Windows Vista, but was unable to get it working. Presumably the techies at 4SmartPhone will come up with an automatic way to connect and configure Outlook 2007 once they officially support it.

My biggest concerns with using this service are, I think, really have more to do with the nature of a hosted mailbox talking to multiple computers and gizmos than with 4SmartPhone.

One, everything isn't updated instantly. That is, when a message arrives in my hosted mailbox, it doesn't get instantly pushed out to everything connected to the mailbox. Messages do get pushed to my smartphone immediately, but my desktop computers don't get updated until they check with the Exchange server on whatever schedule they are configured for. As a result, I sometimes get a message on my phone as much as 10 minutes before it arrives on my PC. Not a real dilemma, but a minor annoyance.

Different clients (when connected to an Exchange mailbox, both Outlook and the mail program in my smartphone act as clients of the Exchange server) handle mail differently. Each copy of Outlook that's connected to the Exchange mailbox can be configured to handle incoming messages differently. So can any mobile device you have connected to the account. That means messages can be treated differently in each place.

Where this is most annoying is with junk mail. the 4SmartPhone Exchange server filters a lot of junk, but some of it gets through. The junk mail filters in Outlook catch a lot of this stuff and automatically dump it in the Junk Mail folder. But my phone doesn't have sophisticated filters like that, and the junk makes it into my phone's Inbox. Again, this isn't a major disaster, and is more of a consequence of having multiple independent clients than a failing of 4SmartPhone.

When compared to the huge benefit of having one mailbox for all your Outlook data, a mailbox that you can reach from anywhere you have an Internet connection, these problems are small. I suggest you visit the 4SmartPhone home page and give their service a try.

Note: For more information on hosted Exchange mailboxes, and on 4SmartPhone in particular, see pages 367-371 of my book, How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007

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• Go to the Living With Outlook home page.