New Version of Mail for Exchange: 2.3

Mail for Exchange, Nokia’s enterprise. push email solution based on Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync protocol, has yet again received an upgrade. The most recent version is Mail for Exchange 2.3.

I’m really impressed by the frequency Nokia updates Mail for Exchange. It seems as if a new version is available every other month or so. Considering the fact that the solution is free I am amazed by the constant updates. Sure, not all the updates are major but I rather have many, incremental updates and tweaks rather than wait a year for some big, bundled update.

Anyway, the new version includes one fix/new feature:

When trying to synchronize with a server that has an expired certificate, the user is now given the choice of continuing the synchronization. Previously, the scenario resulted in an error and the synchronization was stopped. (From the Release Notes)

If you don’t have a Microsoft Exchange acccount but still want to try out the Mail for Exchange and a push email based solution I suggest you sign up for a free Exchange account with Mail2Web. They offer a great, free service.
You can’t beat free. Especially when what you get is a great, useful product or service. One such a great service I stumbled across is Mail2Web LIVE. A free email service based on Microsoft Exchange. Because it is Microsoft Exchanged based, and Mail For Exchange is available as a free download for your Nokia E-Series device you can get free push email on your device.

The set up is very easy. You sign up for Mail2Web LIVE, download and install the Mail For Exchange client on your Nokia E61 and you are up and running.

By signing up to Mail2web LIVE you will get a @mail2web.com email address that is based on Microsoft Exchange 2003 server. You can access your email, calendar, contacts etc through a web interface but the exciting part is the free push email and more feature.

Web2Mail LIVE will push your email, calendar and contacts to your Nokia E-Series device, just like any other Microsoft Exchange implementation.

This is a great service for someone who either wants to just take Microsoft Exchange and Mail For Exchange for a test drive, or someone who wants a reliable and free push email solution. In either case, I highly recommend their service.

Many email providers, for an example gmail, will let you set up email forwarding so that all your received email gets automatically forwarded to an additional address, for an example your @mail2web.com address. This way you can “piggy back” on Mail2Web’s free service and get free push email of other mail accounts.

If your mail provider doesn’t support email forwarding, Mail2Web LIVE can set up email retrieval of POP3 and IMAP accounts. However, mail will only be retrieved once an hour. So while the email will be pushed directly to your device when it arrives at your Mail2Web account, it might take up to an hour for the message to be retrieved by Mail2Web’s servers.

I was genuinely impressed by Mail2Web LIVE service, support and product. It is fast, robust and free
My only complain is that I thought it was hard to find the settings for Mail For Exchange (ActiveSync settings). But if you log on to your customer control panel and go to “Free Services” and then select “Mail2Web LIVE” you will see the settings needed to set up Mail For Exchange on your Nokia E-Series device.

An even minor complaint was that I kept on forgetting to log on with my FULL @mail2web.com’s email address. I tried just using my registered name without the @mail2web.com part, but that didn’t work. So save yourself some trouble and remember to use your FULL email address when you log on to the services.

There are other companies that offers free push email but this is the first company that I have seen that offer free Microsoft Exchange email with the push functionality turned on.

Mail2Web offers a number of paid services such as email and domain hosting as well. I am so impressed by their free service that I am now considering letting them host my e-series.org mail.

UPDATE:
Needless to say be careful when you synchronize your device the first time. If your device contains information already make sure your “Sync Content” preferences are set to “In case of Conflict”, “Phone Wins” the first time you use the service so you don’t accidently erase any data. In addition, do back up all your data before.

Download :

MailForExchange_2.3.0_.part1.rar (879 KB)
MailForExchange_2.3.0_.part2.rar (700 KB)