iPhone: Mac Mail, Exchange, Safari
Here's my take with the the iPhone and e-mail, especially Exchange (since I an Apple sys engineer for a company here in Los Angeles) and getting a lot of inquiries.
Will the iPhone replace my Treo (Windows Mobile or Palm OS) or my Blackberry. I have a good amount of experience supporting Mac OS X (Mail App) users in an Active Directory / Exchange 2003 environment.
Without having ever touched or used an iPhone, and hoping the (ARM) processor in the iPhone is powerful enough to power Mac OS X and all the Mac apps, it will come down to speed of ones data connection either ATT's network or Wi-Fi, of course we anticipate Wi-Fi to be the much faster of the two.
First I tell my Mac users, the iPhone is Mac OS X, and Leopard OS X at that, with all the Leopard underpinnings, that should include Leopard Mail.
So if you can get mail at your work Exchange server on your Mac, then it should be no issue on the iPhone, but first what constitutes a great / acceptable email experience on 10.4 Mail App and Exchange 2003.
A few points to clear up this cob-webbed, long standing issue.
- MS no longer makes a true Outlook client for the Mac, the last one was in 2001 on OS 9, and it used MS's MAPI protocol the same one used in Outlook 2003 / Vista on Windows. Outlook and this protocol have basically been designed to provide speed in getting mail, "Cached Mode", etc. So Windows Outlook 2003 / Vista will always be faster, period. It is, of course, a Microsoft end to end, client / server solution.
- There is no MAPI / Exchange e-mail client for Mac OS X and there very well never will be. When you select the "Exchange" pulldown option in Mac Mail App, it is actually IMAP plus WebDAV. I setup Mac Mail just like this.
- IMAP must be turned ON on the Exchange 2003 server or no e-mail for you. (Many companies will Not turn IMAP on).
- How does one make Mail Apple optimal in an Exchange environment?, and this is the key
All one who is using Mail App in an Exchange environment has to do, is open the Activity Viewer in Mail upon retrieving email, and it can and does take an eternity. Why?
The $64,000 question(s),
- is this just the nature of the IMAP protocol, checking through every email on the server, comparing it to what you have locally and downloading the changes, i.e., new emails (cached mode), you can turn this off, and go faster, and only get headers, but no searching for you, and no local emails.
- is it Tiger's Mail App, some bugginess that makes it slow, is it the process of Downloading All Messages and Attachments (yes, it is big time)
- is it the superfluous Exchange folders (Public Folders) that clog up the activity bandwidth unnecessarily (yes it is).
- it is Exchange 2003's IMAP implementation that slows Mac Mail to a crawl (this I think could be the huge bottleneck)
If so, then why does Apple's Dot Mac IMAP work just great, emails come down very fast, no issues for years with .Mac
- Is it that people do not know how to mange Mail, never actually trashing email, so 1000 plus emails are still on server, never really deleted.
- Is it the ridiculous amounts of attachments in email, people using their work email as file management system for hundreds and hundreds of large PDF files.
The answer is yes to most or all of the above, do all or most of these and your Mac Mail App experience on Exchange 2003 will be a disaster, address these and Mail App works fine in Exchange.
Here's to hoping Leopard Mail will improve things and Apple is addressing these.
So if you do all of this, keep your Mac Mail Inbox to a reasonable level, under 1000 messages and keep the attachments out of the equation, and now Mail works rather fluidly on your current Mac, this should translate to the same experience on iPhone Mail. We'll see. But there will be some challenges.
The way most people will connect to an Exchange server with the iPhone will have to be by pointing the iPhone to the company's Exchange OWA server (Outlook Web Access), and using Safari, yes, web (based) email or web mail, just like many do now. I will test this as soon as I get the iPhone.
The only way for our Mac users to use Mac Mail App to get to their Mail is if they are internal and on the company network, if they are outside the company network, they must use VPN, (which is also accessed via a web browser), Safari works just fine, but it does require SSL and Java, since it launches a Java applet.
Windows Mobile device users, use MS's Active Sync, and we just point them to the public Exchange OWA server and email works fine, in fact, the Exchange server tells them when new mail has arrived.
We shall see, just need to get my iPhone and test this.
Another observation, Steve J and the Apple execs have been using the iPhone for a while now, and I'll bet they use it for email, and I'll bet email works just great, they have made sure of that.
But this is Apple, and they are using OS X Server / IMAP, (not MS Exchange) and I am sure eventually Leopard server for e-mail, Active / Active clustering etc.
In other words, Apple does not need or use Exchange email, so unless they have QA engineers testing this and using it in an Exchange environment (IMAP turned ON), they could not get the feedback and improve upon it. Let's hope Steve J realizes this is a big priority, since many people are tied to corporate Exchange mail.
Here's to hoping they do that, but we know Apple will want companies to move to Leopard Server, Leopard Calendar Server, etc. Very few if any large companies will do this though , but I suspect many SMB's will jump.
Hopefully Apple has all of their ducks in a row with iPhone, iPhone Leopard, iPhone Mail App and Safari, and then there is just the connection speeds to consider.
macguitarman@mac.com
