Hosted Exchange: 1and1.com Exchange Email
Our First Hosted Exchange Partner
When we started Hubpages, I wanted an email service that was asp style, had calendaring, contacts and would work with my Treo 650. We picked 1and1.com as a low cost hosting provider to use for hosting our email.
The Service
For $6.99 per month per account 1and1 will offer hosted Exchange services. This is the lowest cost I found. The service includes
- Microsoft Outlook 2003
- 1 GB of email storage
- Outlook web access (owa)
- Free active-sync
- Task management
- Calendaring
- Contacts
- Notes
- Journal
- Outlook Rules for Email Management
- RPC (MAPI over http with Windows XP and Outlook 2003)
- Personal Domains
The Review
1and1 is a terrible service. Many times our email wasn't accessible, and emails were often received several hours if not days after they were sent. The OWA would return 404 errors. So we would call support and wait excruciating long hold times to be greeted by an incompetent support person. The support people did have tools to "take over control of your computer" to diagnose the problem. When they saw the error, then they would escalate. Several more hours would go by. The service would resume working, but the support people would never follow up, not even with an email acknowledging the problem had been fixed. In a world where email is critical it's too important of a service to go with a low cost partner that delivers a poor service.
1and1 offers an online administrative tool that is slow and cumbersome. You can create accounts, set up forwarding, and do all the basics, but the tool is slow and a pain to use. The documentation isn't great either. Some of the setting up the RPC email was out of date, but it's not that hard to figure out. Accept, for the account name that is automatically assigned to each user. It's a combination of numbers and letters that you'll need to setup active-sync, and RPC Email with Outlook. Once you figure this out the rest is doable.
To make matters worse, I switched from the Treo to a Blackberry. 1and1 doesn't offer Blackberry Exchange Services, so I was always battling keeping my Blackberry mail working. This isn't their fault, but in the end, I wanted a hosted email service partner that would integrate well with my Blackberry.
I agree.. just signed up with 1and1 2 weeks ago.. still can't get the damn email to work properly through their webmail.. can only send.. not receive.. support is totaly worthless. A 4 year old could work for them and probably outsmart most of their tech staff. Ya win some and you lose some... oh well.
A Mess...I agree, useless and a waste of money. The dunb ass that advertises his pic in all the magazines that talks about how great his services are, should spend money on his tech support instead of making sure his picture is pasted all over magazines. If i see hin in the street somewhere i will tell him how his world wide service SUCKS!!.
I'm using 1and1 since 2000. Yes, I experienced occasionaly downtimes, but other than that the service was great. Especially for that price. I have many of my customers using 1and1 and most of them are just fine. The online admin tool was never slow for me.
I've used a 1and1 package for a few years now for my business, and recently upgraded the email accounts to Exchange accounts (instead of 1and1 webmail). Mostly it works great, including Push email to my iPhone3G, but sending messages consistently takes almost exactly 20 minutes each time. Why is this? It was instant with the webmail, and the Exchange accounts do receive all emails instantly, it just takes a while for them to send (whether you do it from Outlook or the Web Access). Any suggestions?
I've been looking around for something cheap and reliable for simply ages! I currently use a mail2web free service to get my email pushed to me and then I reply when I get in the office. It'll do, but it's not ideal and there's no facility for updating your calender which I would love!
I have had 1&1 hosted Exchange for only a few days, yet am pleased with the service so far. I called tech support to walk me through the setup process and found them to be courteous and knowledgable. I was ready to go in five minutes.
I can't speak to the issues others have had with email reliability as I use Gmail with IMAP in Outlook. Gmail works great for archiving with 7+ GB of storage space, and IMAP keeps everything in sync. Although 1&1 doesn't offer Blackberry service, I prefer my netbook over a PDA.
We have had great service from 1&1. It has also saved us a considerable amount when compared to our previous in house exchange server.
2 years ago, when I opened a MS Exchange account, we had a few problem from the get go. That said, their tech support has been exemplary and you do talk to real people that care at 1and1 tech support. The service has been rock solid for many months now.
I have been using MS Exchange from 1 and 1 for over 5 years. The service is excellent, their servers are upgraded regularly, and I have only experienced downtime twice. You cannot go wrong with this service, especially considering the price and what you recieve for it.
they are horrible they ruin my bussiness
I used to have nothing but problems with 1and1, first the billing issues with billing you without notice for anything and everything. Then freezing your account if you stopped the billing, sort of internet blackmail. Then the spam threats to people who transfer mass email accounts to 1and1 from opted in adresses.
Now the new nightmare is Webmail 2.0, yes 1and1 does it again, they promote this new Webmail as BETTER. Once you log into your old webmail you'll note the new changes. A task manager, a calendar and many more things. Trouble is from my experience this stuff is useless and no one uses them. If you could turn this stuff off fine but now the screen is filled with useless icons and waste space and force your main email windows far to down on the page, making it harder to send emails. The interface is complicated, not user friendly and SLOW..... people what SIMPLE email. Not this complicated stuff, OK leave the extras but DON'T include them on start up, turning them OFF is a major pain. start with the OLD basic email page not this new complicated over done page.
If you want email DON'T look to 1and1 as email is now the worst part of their service. Besides Yahoo and Google's free service offers more simple, user friendly interfaces with a cost.
re:
"At this time, there is no way for a customer to revert back to webmail 1.0, and I doubt it will ever be an option since 2.0 is quite better."
But it isn't better.
It's slower.
It takes forever to load and often times out.
You can't just click a box on the left to delete multiple items at once like you used to.
There is more spam.
There is a coding problem causing intermittent problems whereby recipients of an email from me can't read the email (which has never happened before).
It's not better.
And the customer service is not so great. Call them -- each person will be reading from a script. Ask for a supervisor. He or she will read from a script as well. Try to reach someone in corporate. Try to find the corporate number -- it takes some intense research. And when you finally reach corporate, the person you talk to will reroute you to the same IT Department that you spoke with in the first place.
Email them -- and wait for a response. See if the response they give you actually addresses the problem you contacted them about in the first place. See if it looks like a canned response, or as if they have made any changes or taken any proactive steps to address the matter.
Good luck.
Its seems I have found a suitable UK based email exchange service.
I must say, it would have been great to know they didn't have the Blackberry Enterprise Server in advance. Does anyone successfully receive 1and1 exchange emails via their blackberry? I seem to be always having an issue with this, but for some reason my tech insists we need to keep the 1and1 account. Any suggestion on companies we might be able to switch to where it doesn't cost an arm and a leg to have a 100 email addresses?
I have to say, i've used 1and1.co.uk for hosted exchange for the past two years and its been fine. Apart from a glitch when they moved from exchange 2003 to 2007, there have been no problems at all and it works great with my phone.
Will be moving to gmail though (with your handy guide) once I get my Android phone.
There is nothing much more better than to have someone who care from far, far enough to feel individual feelings
Hey, we've been with 1and1.com and we are getting tired of dealing with email down time. We need to move 10 sites over to another provider. Any suggestions?
Go Google as the ad says. We use Gmail hosted for domains. It's really easy to setup the 10 domains. Have them all forward to one account and then there is a setting to let you reply from the account that sent you the mail. So all you need to do is check the one account. Works great on mobile too.
I've been looking for a review about 1and1. Thanks for giving your honest review!
Please check out our Dedicated Exchange Hosting plans. You will not be disappointed.
i ordered a domain name from this company and hosting for that domain. They could not register me the domain name but they got me stuck with one year hosting plan.
now they are about to send me to collections for unpaid hosting that i never used due to not having a domain name to have it hosted.
Does anyone know the telephone number to 1&1 webmail there server is down again for almost a week
send only is related to the advance tab in the microsoft outlook repeat the same info that you inputed in the add account tab
once again, email is down. no estimate as to when this most recent problem might be fixed. horrible customer service. asked for complaint department to complain about my email being down AGAIN and customer service rep told me that they only accept complaints by email. how convenient for them.
I have been using 1and1 for my hosting for over 6 years and I have 5 email accounts (all IMAP) and I never have any problems. It works beautifully across 2 Macs and an iPhone. When I have called the support team, I found the service to be ok, and my question is always answered. For years I have read bad reviews about 1and1, but I have never had a problem myself so I have stuck with them. I currently have over 7,000 emails in my Inbox and a similar amount in my Sent folder, all synched via IMAP and my email has never gone down. I don't understand why other people are losing their service and I'm not. Is it to do with the geography, or are people using Exchange?
I have looked at Google Apps (it has a larger mailbox capacity), but there are a lot of people having trouble with IMAP and Apple Mail 5. Google IMAP also has issues with multiple connections and the service can be frozen for 24 hours with no warning. Based on my own experience, I would say go with 1and1, but if other people are having problems, it's important to know why and take that on board.
I have been using 1and1 for about 6 years and have not had any problems either. They have improved there site and seem to be getting better.
Js 5 years ago
I know what your saying 100%. We had internal exchange setup, and in Dec. 2006 switched. It has been nothing but trouble.