Get Mail for Exchange running on your phone

Having recently signed up for a hosted Exchange service, I want to share my experiences of using a Nokia mobile to connect to an Exchange mailbox. It was a lot easier than I expected, but there are a few hurdles to overcome.

Nokia Exchange
I used the very popular Nokia N95, which has both Wifi networking and 3G mobile broadband built in. It also comes with its own Pop3 and Imap client for email, but nothing to support the native Exchange protocols ­ to add that option you need to go to the Nokia website and download an application called Mail for Exchange.

You can get Mail for Exchange free and can use it not just to send and receive email, but to synchronise your calendar, contacts and tasks. The 2.7.0 version supports a range of handsets and can be used with either Exchange Server 2003 or 2007 plus the implementation included in Windows Small Business Server.

Before we jump into the detail, I need to make one thing clear: according to the release notes, Mail for Exchange can be installed and used on any Nokia N-series device, plus Nokia E-series phones and the 6124 and 6220 Classic. That said, I haven’t tried any of these so I can’t guarantee that the procedures I’m going to outline will be exactly the same or even work at all on anything other than an N95.

Getting started
Installation of Mail for Exchange isn’t difficult as the download comes as a Nokia application installer file (.sisx). As I use Nokia PC Suite, this was automatically copied to my handset via USB and installed onto the phone. The file is about 1.7MB and the whole process took just a couple of minutes.

I then started the application and ran through a few setup steps needed to configure a profile for my Exchange server. In my case, this was my hosted service but it could be a local server on a small business or home network. The principles and requirements are the same either way.

Connecting to the server
In terms of connectivity all you have to do is provide Mail for Exchange with the fully qualified name of the server plus the internet access point that will be used to connect to it. On the N95 that can either be Wifi or a mobile broadband service; I use Wifi at home and a 3G mobile broadband service the rest of the time. It works fine, the only bugbear being the need to make sure I’ve set up the correct access point in advance before synchronising.

Of course, you also need to provide your email username and password, and a few other parameters, which is where my problems started.

To begin with I couldn’t get the Mail For Exchange client to connect to the Exchange server at all. I selected the Synchronise Email option on the phone and it appeared to be doing something, but after a few seconds would disconnect without transferring any data. Naturally I fiddled with the settings but nothing seemed to resolve the problem until I left the Domain name blank, after which it worked fine.

I say it worked fine, except that every time I connected I got an error message telling me that the security certificate being used by the Exchange Server was untrusted. I was able to acknowledge this and continue, but it was irksome and meant that I could only synchronise manually rather than being able to set up an automatic schedule to retrieve my mail.

Following a little bit of research, I found that this was specific to Exchange Server 2007 and was a result of the certificate involved not being in the list preloaded onto the Nokia. Fortunately, I found that I could add it myself.