I Just Got The Best of Both Worlds

I've been a GoodLink user for some time now... well over a year if memory serves me correctly. It has truly been an awesome tool for keeping me connected and informed. I like to think of it as "Outlook for my Treo" as it keeps my calendar, email, contacts, notes, and journal all sync'd up, and all wirelessly over the cellular data networks. But it does have a drawback: it only syncs up a single account and its one user account per device. The reason this is a downside is that I have three other email accounts I check regularly. On my desktop, I check these with Thunderbird and use Outlook for my corporate email. On my Treo, I use ChatterEmail for the three personal accounts and GoodLink for the Outlook/Exchange related items. The problem I've encountered, though, is the inability to simultaneously connect an Exchange server on the server I run at home, as well as the Exchange server I connect to at the office. This all changed today, though...

Today ChatterEmail+/EX was announced. ChatterEmail+/EX allows me to sync my email out of an Exchange server with no third-party services required. No, it doesn't do my contacts or calendar, but I can live without those for the time being. What this means, in terms of my productivity, is that I can now setup Exchange server on my home system, and use ChatterEmail to check the email there, basically having CE check four accounts now instead of just three.

So, now, I can have the best of both worlds... I can continue to use GoodLink to keep me in full sync with my corporate email, calendar, contacts, etc. But I can also use ChatterEmail to keep me in full sync with my personal email hosted on my own Exchange server, while continuing to check my other personal email accounts; though I'm no longer forced to open up POP or IMAP access to the Exchange server over the internet, nor to have it waste connection times (and battery as a result) by checking every X number of minutes. For me, I like to have all my email in one place. Having an email arrive in both Thunderbird and CE, and needing to be deleted in both is a pain. Having my email pop'd off my server and therefore not available via a webmail client is also a pain. As much as I loathe most of M$'s softwares, the fact is, having a real-time push solution to Exchange is a benefit. If the email arrives to Outlook and I delete it, its deleted from CE. Conversly, if I delete it in CE, its deleted from Outlook. And if I choose to leave it and follow-up on it later and only webmail is an option at the time, then I have OWA available. Perhaps best of all, I can install a server-side anti-spam solution with Exchange and have all spam routed to a spam folder and *not* receive it on my Treo (currently, my ISP provides a server-side anti-spam solution, but it only marks it as spam and leaves it to the client to direct it... thus spam emails still arrive in the Inbox of my Treo while they are routed to a spam folder in Thunderbird, and thus I'm still doing double-deleting duty).

For me, the ability to check two different Exchange servers from a single device (albeit from two different softwares on that device) is a god-send.

Thank you Marc Blank! :)

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