MS on iPhone: Exchange IMAP is Pull, Not Push
I’ve been asking Microsoft for an official word on Exchange support for the iPhone for days now, and they finally got back to me. You see, when Walt Mossberg said “It can also handle corporate email using Microsoft’s Exchange system, if your IT department cooperates by enabling a setting on the server,” he was talking about IMAP support - a popular, generic email protocol that can be enabled in Exchange.
Here’s the bad news: through IMAP you lose a lot, according to Microsoft. For one thing, it’s ‘pull′ email only — no push. (The exact phrase MS sent to me was, “Through IMAP, iPhone will have the ability to access corporate email on Exchange using basic ‘pull′ email.”) And without Exchange ActiveSync, you don’t get access to calendars and contacts or centralized device control, which is important to IT departments.
No word yet on the rumors that the iPhone will eventually support Exchange ActiveSync. And yes, you can kludge the push by redirecting all of your mail through an Outlook Rule to a Yahoo! account. But that’s a kludge.
Original post by Sascha Segan