Hi there,
So after my continued battle with making iCloud email work for my needs I caved and had my provider set up a Hosted Exchange account for me. Looking good on my iPhone so far.
Now I need to select he right mail app on my new Mac. So far have been using the generic Apple mail app with iCloud. It's rather meh but not bad either. however, after doing my homework here it seems that Mail and Exchange don't play well on Mavericks (and a fix is underway with 10.9.2 supposedly).
So - what to do? I must say I'm on the fence about signing up for Office 365 home. On the one hand it ain't cheap in the long-run and I hate making myself subject to constant upgrades and forced changes in my workflow (should have stayed away from the Mac world then, I know). Not a fan of subscription models because of that and just spent extra money to avoid it for my Adobe stuff. BUT - given that I could install it on a few machines in the house AND it being cross-platform actually makes it a decent deal. With that I could then install Outlook for every family member who needs it and call it a day. Never used Outlook for personal mail but have been using it at work for decades. So that would be ok.
Alternative is of course Thunderbird which has been my mail program of choice at home. It has it's quirks but at least I know them. Not sure though about the Mac version of it and how well it plays in the Mavericks/Exchange environment.
Options:
1. Set up Exchange in Mail, hoping for the best - maybe wait for the 10.9.2 update
2. Suck it up and buy Office 365 and use Outlook (does that actually work better or are there issues under Mavericks as well with Exchange?)
3. Alternative app such as Thunderbird
Bonus question: considering seamless calendar integration in those scenarios given that I currently use two Google calendars for the family stuff. Those integrate nicely on my iPhone, my wife's Thunderbird as well as my Calendar App on the Mac (syncing easily with Google Cal still). Moving to Outlook throws potentially a wrinkle into that - though as family we don't really need to send "invites" and other stuff that uses email to add or delete stuff from the calendar.
So after my continued battle with making iCloud email work for my needs I caved and had my provider set up a Hosted Exchange account for me. Looking good on my iPhone so far.
Now I need to select he right mail app on my new Mac. So far have been using the generic Apple mail app with iCloud. It's rather meh but not bad either. however, after doing my homework here it seems that Mail and Exchange don't play well on Mavericks (and a fix is underway with 10.9.2 supposedly).
So - what to do? I must say I'm on the fence about signing up for Office 365 home. On the one hand it ain't cheap in the long-run and I hate making myself subject to constant upgrades and forced changes in my workflow (should have stayed away from the Mac world then, I know). Not a fan of subscription models because of that and just spent extra money to avoid it for my Adobe stuff. BUT - given that I could install it on a few machines in the house AND it being cross-platform actually makes it a decent deal. With that I could then install Outlook for every family member who needs it and call it a day. Never used Outlook for personal mail but have been using it at work for decades. So that would be ok.
Alternative is of course Thunderbird which has been my mail program of choice at home. It has it's quirks but at least I know them. Not sure though about the Mac version of it and how well it plays in the Mavericks/Exchange environment.
Options:
1. Set up Exchange in Mail, hoping for the best - maybe wait for the 10.9.2 update
2. Suck it up and buy Office 365 and use Outlook (does that actually work better or are there issues under Mavericks as well with Exchange?)
3. Alternative app such as Thunderbird
Bonus question: considering seamless calendar integration in those scenarios given that I currently use two Google calendars for the family stuff. Those integrate nicely on my iPhone, my wife's Thunderbird as well as my Calendar App on the Mac (syncing easily with Google Cal still). Moving to Outlook throws potentially a wrinkle into that - though as family we don't really need to send "invites" and other stuff that uses email to add or delete stuff from the calendar.
Last edited: