Get Mail for Exchange running on your phone

Not to be trusted
The first thing I needed to know was who had issued the certificate, which was fairly easy as Mail For Exchange gave me the option to view the certificate details when the error message popped up. In my case it was issued by the Usertrust Network (UTN-USERFirst-Hardware), but don’t assume this provider in every case.

I then used Outlook Web Access to connect to the Exchange server from a PC. I was able to locate the UTN-USERFirst-Hardware certificate that had been downloaded to the browser and export it to a file ready to copy to the phone. I used Mozilla Firefox to do this but Internet Explorer has a similar facility.

It’s then possible to copy the exported certificate to the phone manually, but there are issues with the format at the Nokia end and I found lots of forum posts describing problems with this approach. So instead I used a certificate import server by Willem Redelijkheid in the Netherlands.

All I had to do was browse to this site and upload my newly exported certificate to Willem’s server where it was converted to the correct format, generating a URL pointing to a certificate ready to install onto my phone.

I simply opened the URL using the browser on the Nokia N95 and the certificate downloaded and installed.

You can also use this server for other Symbian-based handsets and, in my case it provided an instant fix. No more annoying messages when I synchronised Mail for Exchange, just an automatic connection.

As I mentioned earlier, Mail for Exchange also lets you synchronise calendar, contacts and tasks. The only drawback is the lack of support for push email such as that available with Blackberry and Windows Mobile smartphones. However, you can set up synchronisation schedules to collect mail on a regular basis.

Exchange authentication
Next, I wanted to use my notebook to access my mailbox, but encountered another problem when I tried to configure Outlook 2007 to pick up mail using Outlook Anywhere.

Most of the Exchange service providers now support Outlook Anywhere as a matter of course. And that’s good in that it makes it easy to access an Exchange server over the internet. There’s very little you have to do to make it work and I’d had no trouble at all configuring Outlook 2007 on my main desktop running Windows Vista. On the notebook, however, I was repeatedly asked for my username and password and could get no further.

Outlook Web Access worked just fine, so I knew there was nothing wrong with the credentials but, try as I might, Outlook itself just wouldn’t log on. I even tried uninstalling Office and reloading it, but that was just a waste of a couple of hours.

Eventually, I discovered that it had something to do with the way the Exchange server was authenticating the username, as I found other Windows 7 users having similar issues and reporting that tweaking the authentication settings on the server fixed them. However, that’s not possible with a hosted service. I had to look for another answer that could be applied at the client end, which was to log on to the server with a slightly different name.

As with most hosted Exchange services I had typed in my email address ­ in the format name@emaildomain.com ­ whenever Outlook asked. This, however, wasn’t being resolved to the local Active Directory (AD) username required to identify me on the Windows server. Switching to Active Directory credentials ­ in the format ADdomain\exchange_username ­ got around the problem. I still needed to tell Exchange what my email address was, but when asked to log on to the server, I switched to the AD name.

So how did I find out what Active Directory name to use? Easy, I simply logged onto Exchange using Outlook Web Access, clicked on Options and selected ‘Change password’ to display the domain and username on the screen If that doesn’t work you can always phone the hosting company and ask them.