3G iPhone - Will it pull messages through Microsoft Webmail?
 

With the introduction of the new 3G iPhone today, my curiousity and gadget wants are getting the best of me.

Currently I have a Blackberry 8830. I have it set up to pull my Yahoo email and additionally, it will pull my work email through Microsoft Webmail. This is to say that it is not set up on the enterprise server, but still delivers my mail to an inbox folder. It is simple to set up with webmail and is part of the initial email setup feature on the Blackberry.

Does anyone know if this is availible on the new iPhone?

Do you mean Exchange or Hotmail?

The Exchange support is supposed to be built in to the 2.0 OS via the ActiveSync protocol, making it very functional, but I haven't had a chance to try/see it yet. Not sure about hotmail, though I am reasonably confident that they have an interface for it.

No not exchange.

It's microsoft webmail. It allows me to log on to my work email (which is through microsoft office) from any browser anywhere. My wife's company has it too....

The blackberry allows you to set up you email using this configuration if you don't have enterprise ability.

Outlook Web Access?

Yes. Thanks you for correcting me on the name...I just call it webmail!! :D

So to answer the earlier question, you have Microsoft Exchange. OWA is a web interface for that.:D

Exchange support is supposedly a part of the new iPhone (I haven't tried it first-hand), but even without that you should be able to set up an IMAP connection to your mailbox. Unless your IT folks turned off IMAP, of course.

MS OWA works badly on Firefox and Safari for some reason I just can't figure. Since the iPhone uses Safari...

Wirelessly posted (Nokia E71: Opera/9.50 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.1.11355/542; U; en))

You should be able to setup Microsoft Exchange on your iPhone quite easily. Just tap on the Exchange logo and provide the wizard with your e-mail address, username, password and server address. The server address should be identical to the URL you're currently using for accessing Outlook Web Access (except maybe the word 'owa').

iphone 2.0 outlook web access
 

Well I have been playing around with this with no success.

It's no problem to access both of my corporate email accounts using the outlook web access URL to configure my blackberry but nothing seems to work with the new iphone. Anyone have any ideas ?

What is so bad about it? I've used it and it seems fine to me. Using it on my iPod Touch/Safari you can only use the "light" version which is pretty functional. On firefox, I've been able to use the "full" version which is almost like having outlook running in my experience. In fact, I usually use OWA instead of Outlook just because it is much more lightweight.

owa push email
 

Yes I know you can browse via safari but here we are asking about push email from the owa site. Blackberry has always had this capability. Most corporate email exchange servers currently won't recognise the iphone log on.

It's not as simple as that. The reason you can access the email from your Blackberry is that your company has a secure connection from inside its network to the Blackberry network. This is also the same reason that you can browse to the OWA site from Blackberry but not on the iPhone, which is trying to reach it from the Internet.

There are several options available:

1. Have your IT department open up the relevant ports to allow external (internet-facing) to your Exchange server using SSL. The iPhone can connect in this way.

2. Use the iPhone VPN client, with a profile supplied by your IT department (either the Cisco VPN option or the standard L2TP / PPTP VPN) that will allow the iPhone to connect to the inside of your network. You will then be able to connect to your Exchange server using the iPhone push mail client or using OWA.

Hope this helps.

I'm not an Exchange admin nor do I know much about it, but I know with my company at least we can access OWA from any web browser with internet access. I've successfully accessed OWA using the Hotel wifi on my iPod Touch in Paris, to an internet cafe in Cambodia, so it is definitely not an internal only thing (unless maybe configured that way).

If you are using v2.0 of the software and the ActiveSync client (i.e. clicking on the Exchange button) then any server installed in the past ~4 years should recognize it no problem. Where are you coming up with the statement that most won't support it?

I dislike the light version, but it is better than nothing when I'm in a pinch and need access to my email. If you are using the "Full" version in FF you are almost certainly using the IE rendering bit for that page. There are a number of bits in the OWA full interface that will only work with IE and not with other browsers.