By Ewan MacLeod in Mobile Data — Dec 21, 2006

Setting Up Good Mobile Messaging & Fasthosts Exchange hosting

Here’s my second piece about Good Mobile Messaging — this time looking at setting it up with Fasthosts.

As you know I’ve been a BlackBerry user for about 4 years … and an avid one at that.

In the beginning…

I remember distinctly being sat in a bar with Steve and Tim of Infomob PR when they first showed me a Blackberry. It was the 7,000 series device. I remember them sending emails between each other and being absolutely astounded at the speed of the service — and the fact it was ‘always on’ with GPRS. They showed me their calendar updating, their contacts updating — but most of all, I was really impressed — nay, I was floored — by the speed and potential of Blackberry.

The Infomob chaps put me in touch with a guy at o2. I phoned him up and asked for a Blackberry. I was a little bit surprised when he explained that I needed an Enterprise server, Exchange server and … Well… Thousands of pounds worth of equipment and services — just to get hold of a Blackberry.

So I did some research and found out that T-Mobile had a Blackberry service running ‘Instantemail’. If you’re an independent entrepreneur like me, you had to buy the Blackberry on its own because you didn’t want to go and buy an Enterprise level suite.

I simply redirected my email to my T-Mobile instantemail account, so if you emailed me, a copy was sent to the Blackberry and a copy was sent to my Outlook. The major arse here was that nothing synched over the air. When I deleted a few hundred spam on my Blackberry whilst sat in the train, I’d get into the office and find another copy waiting to be deleted on my office email. Arse.

But I didn’t want to pay the thousands of pounds for a proper Exchange system. It was only Hetty and I who used Blackberries at our company.

The Blackberry, despite the non-synching arse, was nothing short of revolutionary. It completely changed my lifestyle. I could get off the plane in New York and all the emails would come flying in. On the cab on the way to the hotel all my clients were getting replies from me. Gahhh! It was phenomenal. Unlike many, I have the ability to place the Blackberry on the table and not look at it obsessively. However, I was regularly attached to it because the Blackberry magnified the excitement of day to day business by giving me real-time messaging.

And then I heard about hosted Exchange. Some American services were offering the ability to get the sexy Blackberry features by just paying something like a tenner a month.

I effectively downed tools and hunted for a hosted exchange service for my Blackberry. I was hooked. Poor Hetty put up with me while I tested, changed, configured and screwed about with countless services. I spend hundreds of pounds of our ‘research’ budget experimenting. I managed to configure our UK Blackberries to work with these hosted US Exchange services — and, for a few minutes, I experienced the glory that is unified real-time over-the-air synched messaging……..

And then I noticed the speed. Oh dear. It was appalling. Absolutely appalling. I couldn’t use it. Mails took MINTUTES to arrive. That’s not good enough for me. So I tried other hosted exchange services. Useless.

I tried some UK based ones. Useless. I was secretly hoping that they’d be really fast. They were brilliant on the desktop — I could login via Outlook to the desktop Exchange server no problem, but when it came to the Blackberry, the services was, frankly, shit.

There seemed to be some sort of Emperor’s New Clothes thing going on. I tried a whole range of UK services but – WITHOUT EXCEPTION – they were slow, slow, slow.

If you’re a florist only using your Blackberry to send a mail to your granny once a year, slow Exchange service is perfectly fine. But if you’re a hyper connected internet new media geek like me, slow service doesn’t cut it.

So, about two years ago, I finally gave up. I think I spent about 500 pounds just on test accounts alone. I couldn’t understand why these companies (UK and US) didn’t GET my problem. I can’t wait 10 minutes for a mail to arrive.

If I have to wait 10 minutes, then I’ll go and get a sodding XDA. What’s the point of delivering shit slow service to my (once) lightning fast Blackberry? Both UK and US tech supports for a whole variety of services didn’t understand what my problem was. Surely I didn’t need to go and chuck £5k JUST so I could get my OWN, FAST service?

In my travels, I’d come across Good. I saw their logo once or twice on various US mail hosting services but they were always shown as the messaging platform to connect Exchange to a Windows Mobile device — irrelevant to me since I was desperately seeking for a workable Blackberry service.

I’d come across Fasthosts before – everyone I’d spoken to about them did the quiet nod – the same sort of nod I received when I’d tell clients that our servers were hosted with Datapipe and Rackspace – the quiet nod of tacit approval and respect.

So when I heard that Fasthosts were offering exchange hosting and Good Mobile Messaging for Symbian (as well as Windows Mobile), my interest was peaked.

A good reputation + a potentially exciting application = definitely worth a look.

I was a bit brief with the setup process in the last piece so here’s an in-depth overview. I’m going to go all geeky on your ass.

So the representative from Good had already got me sorted out an account on their demonstration exchange server. This was the one that I was fawning over and seeing perform extremely fast. I left the meeting with the chap and headed back to my office to check some email. I’d just swapped from the Blackberry, if you remember – I took my SIM out of the Blackberry and stuck it into the E61, so I couldn’t check my mail.

The demo account was useful, yes, … but really, I wanted to see my mail on the E61, right away. Back a the office, I found the Fasthosts website and navigated to the ‘hosted email’ option and was surprised to see a 30-day free trial option. Ooooh.

‘Screw it,’ I thought, and I immediately decided to setup interactiveenergy.co.uk – one of or company’s main domains – to point to Fastshosts.

It was a piece of piss to setup.

1. Register an account on the Fasthosts page. No payment necessary – true to their 30 day free trial promise.
2. Redirect your domain name. I simply changed the IP address and name of our domain’s mail server to the details supplied by the Fasthosts registration screen.
3. I specified that I wanted an Exchange account with 1,000 meg of diskspace.
4. Done. Gosh. My account was setup and active in about 2 minutes. That included typing in my name, address and so on.
5. I had to wait a few hours for the DNS updates to take effect across the web.
6. When I specified I wanted an Exchange account, I also checked the box for ‘Good Mobile Messaging’. After 60 seconds, that gave me a special username and password to login to.

Done. So now I want to get Good on my phone.

If you recall, my device was already setup with a demo Good account. Well, I had to call the Good chap and ask him to delete the service. You can only have Good working on one device at a time. Makes sense.

I uninstalled Good and waited…

… As chance would have it, I was standing waiting for a colleague to meet me at Euston Station when I got a text from the Good chap letting me know the demo account had been deactivated, so I was ready to install my own proper service. Get in.

So here I am in Euston Station: