Mobile Me and Mail Rules

With the excitement of the upcoming iPhone 2 firmware and launch of the Mobile Me cloud service July is going to be a great month for Apple fans. MobileMe is the most significant upgrade for us. Having been .Mac users for a number of years now we did feel this may have been our last year, the service itself is great but limitations to the .mac mail service made it a second choice to Gmail.

One of the biggest benefits of Gmail (other than the fact it is free) is the probably unbeatable spam system. Like an exchange server users can set filters and mail rule at server level (the cloud) this means filtered or moved email doesn’t get placed the in main email folder. This is particularly relevant in a Push mail system where you don’t want spam or selected email sent to your mobile device.

Mail rules were, in our opinion the big fault with .Mac although you can set up fully function email rules in mail.app and these sync with other Macs on the account they didn’t function with the iPhone or the .Mac webmail system.

Apple have described Mobile Me as Exchange for the rest of us but I really hope they have applied as aspects of Exchange, in particular the mail management side of the service. 

There are server-side rules and client-side rules in an Exchange environment. Server-side rules will work with any client (including Outlook Web Access and Outlook Web Access Light) regardless of where they were created whereas client-side rules only work with the actual client being used.

This would be the perfect solution for MobileMe, the ability for the user to be in complete control of what happens to email when it arrives at the server. If MobileMe ignores this side of cloud computing then Gmail, although not offering push still remains a very attractive option for the spam filtering alone. Fingers crossed! If mail rules have been applied then the MobileMe service is going to be pretty hard to beat.
 

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Filed Under News   | Tags: mac, mobile me, the cloud