Our group switched from Deskmail to UW Exchange last week. I won’t address the politics of the switch, but I thought it would be good to write a bit on how things are going for me.
First of all, many of us technically didn’t “switch to Exchange”, rather “Exchange was enabled”. In other words, mail which is sent from within Exchange goes to the Exchange inbox, but all other mail goes to the Deskmail inbox. Why keep two inboxes? I’ll try to explain why I’m keeping both, but first a description of how I’m got my mail client set up. I won’t touch on calendaring, since I’m still trying to work that out.
My mail client is the Mail application bundled with Mac OS X, which many refer to as Mail.app. It’s easy to use multiple accounts, so adding another one pointing to UW Exchange was pretty straightforward. When you set up an account and select “Exchange”, everything is the same as a normal IMAP account other than being prompted for the location of the Outlook Web Access server.
I didn’t want to switch back and forth between multiple inboxes (even though I can clearly see which has new messages), and wanted to continue to see messages threaded together. I selected both Deskmail and Exchange inboxes to see them in one view and threading just worked. I was pretty happy, except after navigating to other folders, I needed to remember to reselect the two mailboxes.
At first I resisted using a Smart Mailbox to coalesce the inboxes. I remembered Smart Mailboxes being quite slow, but that was with older hardware coupled with an older version of the OS and Mail.app. I tried setting up a simple Smart Mailbox which includes messages from the two inboxes and I can’t detect any slowness, so that’s what I’m using now. I’m guessing the fact that the search criteria are very simple doesn’t hurt the speed, either.
For sending mail, I have both accounts set up to send through smtp.washington.edu; I’m not using the Exchange SMTP relay. Everything goes into the Deskmail sent mail folder, which makes one fewer Smart Mailbox I need to maintain.
So why don’t I just forward all my mail over to Exchange?. A few reasons, in no particular order:
- Admittedly I’m much more familiar with Deskmail. Deserved or not, my comfort level is higher with it than with Exchange.
- My daily workflow has changed very little. In fact, I only think about which messages are in the Exchange inbox vs. the Deskmail inbox because it’s something I just happen to be looking at.
- I’m still able to use EDM for mail filtering. I can change rules without having to fire up Outlook (after having fired up Windows on a VM).
- All my non-inbox folders are still on Deskmail, so I’d at least have that part enabled anyway.
Since at this time we can’t have all Exchange mail just forwarded to Deskmail (not to mention you wouldn’t want to forward meta messages, such as calendar appointments and forwarding rules), this was the best solution I’ve come up with for now, and it didn’t involve that much time to set up. Calendaring looks like it’ll be a different story, however. I’ll write about that after I’ve used it more.
