Exchange vs. Hotmail

[JPDVM2014]

I was just on another forum and saw where a person purchased hosting on an exchange server for a per month fee. I am curious as to how exchange differs from hotmail? The reason I stumbled onto it is because I like the Outlook Icon on windows phone and was looking into how to use Outlook on my phone. Lol.

 

[brad4560]

Exchange is Microsoft's business email and collaboration software, where Hotmail is their consumer brand email. Most exchange users are in a company with email accounts for their business, although Microsoft has a cloud based exchange offering called office 365 (which I use) . And yes usually using exchange from this office 365, or other Microsoft exchange hosted provider there is a monthly charge. I do not know if you can access your regular Hotmail thru outlook on the phone?

 

[jfa1]

Outlook no longer directly syncs with windows hotmail although that feature is being restored in the Apollo update later this year. Right now there are many on lines companies who provide a copy of outlook and an exchange server for use for about 10.00 a month and office 365 can be had for as little as 6.00 a month

 

[JPDVM2014]

Are there any advantages to exchange/office 365?

 

[Bifurcated]

Are there any advantages to exchange/office 365?

The big advantage of Office 365 is if you want to use Outlook as your client on your PC. Outlook works best when using the EAS protocol to talk to the mail server. Hotmail doesn't support EAS for desktop clients. (Strangely, it does support it for mobile clients.) So you have to use IMAP on the desktop, which doesn't work as well, and also doesn't give you task and calendar sync. EAS enables the full vision of cloud email, since your phone and desktop Outlook client will always be magically fully synced. So Outlook on the desktop doesn't go well with Hotmail.

If you are happy using the Hotmail web client on your desktop (and plan to always be connected to the Internet), you won't have this sync problem, and so you would have no reason to subscribe to Office 365 or equivalent.

 

[jfa1]

And supposedly in Apollo later this year outlook sync with WP will be re-enabled with a new improved and renamed synching app.

 

[welsbloke]

Sticking with Office 365 as an example of a Exchange mailbox provider and forgetting the other benefits you would recieve if you took up a 365 subscription the benefits of EAS via an Exchange 2010 mail server are as follows:

You can setup up your out of office on the hoof
Mail is pushed to your phone
You can search your local copy of your sync'd mailbox (Typically 7 days) and if you cannot find it continue the search on your mailbox in the cloud (Thats a pretty nifty feature especially when you have 25GB mailboxes)
You can search your local contacts and your global address book (Obviously this will be pretty small if you are the only person on your Office 365 account)
Synchronising tasks and contacts between Outlook and the Phone

Of course to benefit from all the features you would need an Exchange 2010 mail server (Office 365 gives you that) and Outlook (2010 preferred and actually you can subscribe to that from Office 365 as well).

Hotmail benefits its totally free unless you go for the premium thingybob.

 

[JPDVM2014]

Thanks for all the input! From what I can tell, it wouldn't be worth it for me to subscribe. The only thing I am curious about is Office 365's push mail. Is it the same as Hotmail's push? From what I understand, most web-based emails "push" is more like polling consistently, where as real push the server sends a notice that there is mail then the phone polls for it. I might be wrong though...

 

[welsbloke]

Push works on a heartbeat approach. It makes a connection to the mail server and then periodically sends a heartbeat to the mail server to maintain the connection then when the mail server receives a mail it pushes to your phone.

Office 365 is a collection of products and is in essence traditional office mail server with a sharepoint server and Lync a sort of business version of skype thatis actually pretty sweet.

For the small business user 365 is pretty damn good value especially if you then host your external website it effectively then becomes your webhost as well.

Big fan of 365.

 

[N8ter]

The big advantage of Office 365 is if you want to use Outlook as your client on your PC. Outlook works best when using the EAS protocol to talk to the mail server. Hotmail doesn't support EAS for desktop clients. (Strangely, it does support it for mobile clients.) So you have to use IMAP on the desktop, which doesn't work as well, and also doesn't give you task and calendar sync. EAS enables the full vision of cloud email, since your phone and desktop Outlook client will always be magically fully synced. So Outlook on the desktop doesn't go well with Hotmail.

If you are happy using the Hotmail web client on your desktop (and plan to always be connected to the Internet), you won't have this sync problem, and so you would have no reason to subscribe to Office 365 or equivalent.

Outlook does not use EAS. EAS is a mobile protocol for synching.

I'm pretty sure, Outlook uses RPC over HTTP to sync with Exchange, which is completely different.

Hotmail does not support IMAP. It supports POP3 and DeltaSync - the latter of which is implemented in Outlook Connector/Outlook 2010 and in Windows Live Mail. Hotmail has never supported IMAP. Exchange, however, does support IMAP as well as OWA which can be used to sync email to some clients (i.e. Blackberries via BIS can use OWA to sync Exchange mailboxes).

You can use Windows Live Mail and Outlook to Sync Windows Live data. The main issue -some- people have is the way it partitions off Windows Live data from your main Outlook data. People just want to have everything in one place, instead of having to duplicate it due to the way it's handled by Outlook.

This can easily be solved, by people who have no hard preferences, by simply switching to Windows Live Mail. For others, paying for a hosted Exchange account and using that is a worthy work around. I personally think it's a waste of cash. I did have a Hosted Exchange account for a while, though. Just didn't seem worth the hassle to me. If you use different platforms concurrently the Exchange account can free you from having to have accounts on multiple services (though that's a bit harder to do these days ).

 

[Fleon]

Outlook no longer directly syncs with windows hotmail although that feature is being restored in the Apollo update later this year. Right now there are many on lines companies who provide a copy of outlook and an exchange server for use for about 10.00 a month and office 365 can be had for as little as 6.00 a month

What? Outlook no longer syncs with Hotmail?
Then how have I been getting my mail for the past 3 years?
You are completely wrong.

 

[Fleon]

The big advantage of Office 365 is if you want to use Outlook as your client on your PC. Outlook works best when using the EAS protocol to talk to the mail server. Hotmail doesn't support EAS for desktop clients. (Strangely, it does support it for mobile clients.) So you have to use IMAP on the desktop, which doesn't work as well, and also doesn't give you task and calendar sync. EAS enables the full vision of cloud email, since your phone and desktop Outlook client will always be magically fully synced. So Outlook on the desktop doesn't go well with Hotmail.

If you are happy using the Hotmail web client on your desktop (and plan to always be connected to the Internet), you won't have this sync problem, and so you would have no reason to subscribe to Office 365 or equivalent.

Although this is somewhat repetitive since I just posted...

This is entirely wrong. Outlook works extremely well with Hotmail. There's a download called the "Outlook Hotmail Connector" which syncs mail, contacts, and calendars to Hotmail from Outlook.

Seeing as how the rest of what you have said seems suspect (Hotmail doesn't have IMAP) I question if you've ever used Hotmail. Or Outlook.

 

[welsbloke]

Outlook does not use EAS. EAS is a mobile protocol for synching.

I'm pretty sure, Outlook uses RPC over HTTP to sync with Exchange, which is completely different.

You are correct Outlook uses RPC over HTTPS at least it did for Exchange 2007 and Outllook 2007, pretty that has not changed.