15 Jul
Posted by scottc as Mobile applications, iPhone
The newest iPhone software added a much needed feature; push email. And at the same time, Apple introduced their own push mail service; MobileMe.
The Apple version costs $99 for a year, but today I’ll show you a free alternative that is, in my opinion even better.
Mail2Web is a well established hosting provider that has been offering free Exchange accounts for years. I’ve been a very satisfied customer (with my Windows Mobile phone) for ages.
Their free Mail2Web Live service offers a basic Exchange push service with your own @mail2web.com address. You can forward your existing email to this address, or use their service to pull your own email into their system. The free service is ad supported and everything you send has your mail2web.com address in the “from field”.
For just $4.95 a month you can upgrade to Mail2Web personal; this allows you to use your own email address and access the service through Outlook Web Access. For just $59.40 you get a service that is essentially the same as MobileMe, but with TRUE push features.
You get a full 30 day money back guarantee and no setup fee is charged!
Update: I’ve been a little harsh on MobileMe, as commenter TivoBoy points out, there is a lot more to the Apple service than just Email.
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4 Responses
tivoboy
July 15th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
1Mail2web is a GREAT service, I have been using them for several years. I thought their pricing had gone up though for true “reply to” email address authentication. But, regardless, this is a great exchange (full exchange with OWA as well) mail service for push email needs.
But, to add, the MM service offers a GREAT deal more than just the push mail solutions. The MM service also offers, 20GB of online storage with full syncing capabilities between the iphone, pc’s and macs. To included, files, photos, etc. They also have a very nice photo storage, sharing, F&F upload facility and this can be sync’d with iphoto (if you have a mac of course) and allow friends to not only VIEW, DOWNLOAD, RUN SLIDESHOWS but also ADD photos to your online GALLERIES. I think it is very slick.
The file sharing is also nice in that it will allow you to share a LINK to a file on your local disk (again, on a mac, iphone or pc) with anyone else simply with an email link for them to download. So, this is really a feature set that would ADD a years functionality of something like SUGARSYNC (another EXCELLENT PRODUCT highlighted here before I think)
Of course, HAVING MM, allows a mac user to do so much more – with iWeb the monkey dumb capable website, blog, photo book, photo sharing online automatic website creation tool found again in iPhoto on the mac. Makes things really easy, like pushing up straight from iphoto to a website, with password access to boot so friends far and wide can view your photos, etc. EVEN if they have a mac or an appletv product they can have these photo sites AUTOMATICALLY displayed in their corresponding MAC or ATV product. This is REALLY slick.
So, if you compare the functionality of ALL these very useful, easy to use products, and add some extra $$ to the mix the pricing of 99$ (often found at 50-75$ online and APPARENTLY available to iphone 3G users for 69$ for year 1) starts to sound like a pretty nice deal indeed.
M2W does the exchange bit and hosting quite nicely and economically, but it doesn’t do any of the additional functionality or offer the storage that MM does.
scottc
July 15th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
2Very good points - thanks for that!
Robert
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:28 am
3It comes down to one thing for me. Being able to send from my personal email address. I love Apple, but I really deplore their not making this a feature of dotMac or now MM.
Another Alternative
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:18 am
4i havent tried mail2web, but i use http://iphone.hyperoffice.com, which has worked great for me so far. in addition to synching personal info (mail, contacts, tasks, calendars), they also allow me to share this info, and also access and collaborate on documents. they also position themselves as an “exchange alternative”
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