Hosted Exchange: 1and1.com Exchange Email

When we started Hubpages, I wanted an email service that was asp style, had calendaring, contacts and would work with my Treo 650. We picked 1and1.com as a low cost hosting provider to use for hosting our email.

The Service

For $6.99 per month per account 1and1 will offer hosted Exchange services. This is the lowest cost I found. The service includes

• Microsoft Outlook 2003
• 1 GB of email storage
• Outlook web access (owa)
• Free active-sync
• Task management
• Calendaring
• Contacts
• Notes
• Journal
• Outlook Rules for Email Management
• RPC (MAPI over http with Windows XP and Outlook 2003)
• Personal Domains

The Review

1and1 is a terrible service. Many times our email wasn't accessible, and emails were often received several hours if not days after they were sent. The OWA would return 404 errors. So we would call support and wait excruciating long hold times to be greeted by an incompetent support person. The support people did have tools to "take over control of your computer" to diagnose the problem. When they saw the error, then they would escalate. Several more hours would go by. The service would resume working, but the support people would never follow up, not even with an email acknowledging the problem had been fixed. In a world where email is critical it's too important of a service to go with a low cost partner that delivers a poor service.

1and1 offers an online administrative tool that is slow and cumbersome. You can create accounts, set up forwarding, and do all the basics, but the tool is slow and a pain to use. The documentation isn't great either. Some of the setting up the RPC email was out of date, but it's not that hard to figure out. Accept, for the account name that is automatically assigned to each user. It's a combination of numbers and letters that you'll need to setup active-sync, and RPC Email with Outlook. Once you figure this out the rest is doable.

To make matters worse, I switched from the Treo to a Blackberry. 1and1 doesn't offer Blackberry Exchange Services, so I was always battling keeping my Blackberry mail working. This isn't their fault, but in the end, I wanted a hosted email service partner that would integrate well with my Blackberry.