Exchange Email Accounts For The Individual

email heaven for less than a tenner a month

At the start of December I set myself up with an MS Exchange mailbox. Years on the web had left me with a number of email accounts scattered around all over the place – it was way past time to streamline my communications.

The main account I’ve been using over the years was a Totalise address (now Madasafish). Some time ago this had swapped from being a pretty good free service to a pretty bad paid service, the operator had been bought out and frankly isn’t worth the (small) monthly fee. However, I’ve had that address for so long, and signed up to so many mailing lists, web sites and forums that simply cutting it dead isn’t really an option. As the the current provider doesn’t offer an Exchange service or a mail forwarding option I needed a different approach.

After a little casting around I settled on thinkgrid, they offer a single Exchange account for just £8.00 a month. The pre-sales guys were really helpful and even after I’d handed over the cash the support was excellent. The only downside is thinkgrid don’t offer remote POP3 polling, if you know of an Exchange provider that does I’d love to hear from you – I couldn’t find one.

I thought I was dead in the water at this point and would have to run at least one POP3 account alongside the Exchange mailbox. However as it turns out it was Gmail to the rescue. It’s possible to poll any POP3 account and retrieve mail directly into your Gmail inbox. Then to finish off the process Gmail offers mail forwarding, so with 2 hops I can forward the totalise mail and my Google mail to the new Exchange account.

So now with a combination of the Gmail technique and simple forwarding I’m collecting all mail into a single inbox that has all the great features of exchange. I can access my mail from any machine I work on, this includes all the folders I’ve setup to file mail.

Push email on my iPhone:

This costs an extra couple of pounds a month but boy it’s worth it! Battery life is a bit down on the 3G iPhone but I still get a day out of the battery and I’m rarely that far from a way to charge it.

Getting all my regular contacts to use the odd-uk.com email address won’t be a problem, so the next phase is swapping all the online accounts. Six months should be long enough to find all the places my old email address is used that I really want to stay signed up with, then I can switch off all the other accounts one by one. Email heaven

Getting yourself connected with an MS Exchange email account is now so cheap, and the productivity gains so great, it’s something you really should be investigating.