Goodbye Exchange, Hello Gmail IMAP
Ever since I heard late last year that my campus was moving to MS Exchange, I’ve been grumbling. I thought then that this was a shockingly misguided decision, and since the rollout, my suspicions have only been confirmed.
When they flipped the switch on the transition, I realized that Apple Mail—which had always worked flawlessly with the previous IMAP server—now was unusable with Exchange’s IMAP gateway. Moreover, none of the advanced calendaring functionality was available to me unless I wanted to change email clients (to MS Entourage). I did not, and resented the fact that the decision to move to a proprietary solution was creating two classes of users on campus: those who used the full closed MS stack, and those that did not. I have yet to be on a committee where the chair insists on scheduling through Exchange, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time. I also resented the heavy-handed way IT administrators were pressuring people to conform to their single source vision.
So I started to lessen my dependence on the campus mail system, and move more of it to GMail. But that only went so far given the lack of IMAP support. Thankfully, Google is now rectifying that limitation. To wit, I’ve now got a solid, reliable IMAP server, an online calendar with an open API, and an open source cross-platform client (Mozilla’s Thunderbird + Lightning) that works beautifully with both.
Problem solved.
