Phillo's site > Mac Rants

I do not understand why I cannot easily connect my standard Mac Os X email client to Outlook Web Access like I do using the Email client of my iPhone.

I’ve tried every combination of sites and configuration but it seems there is no way do to so, the connection to a Outlook Server is required to access a mail server and cannot work using just the standard OWA access. Unluckily the mail server of my company it’s not exposed on the Internet, while OWA is.

The only solution I’ve found was to use the Enturage client from the older version of Microsoft Office, that works without problems and allow me to access my work email from my Mac from a rich client that also caches the email messages on disk and not only via Outlook Web Access.

The same problem applies to the latest Outlook included in the latest office for Mac.

In both case it’s something I do not understand, the code for accessing email via OWA was available (Apple has included it on the iPhone client and Microsoft had it available from the Entourage code base) and I see that having OWA exposed to Internet and not the mail server is a pretty common scenario in the enterprise world, but nor Microsoft nor Apple chooses to include this basic functionality inside their flagship email clients.

For Outlook I’ve also found (later) that it cannot access neither the Exchange server of my company because it requires Exchange Server 2007 and we did not upgrade from 2003, so I’m forced to use Entourage to read my office email also when connected to the office network. Luckily the Entourage mail client (also if quite old with a not so nice look&feel) it’s quite powerful and allow me do to all the thing I need to do via email.