Why are there no mail apps with exchange support?

[tanyet]

As far as I can tell there's outlook (horribly overpriced) and Apple Mail. What's the holdup? There are some outstanding mail applications out there but they only support pop or imap and not EWS. Is this a microsoft problem?

 

[BrianBaughn]

Hard to do well, I suppose. Even the apps you mentioned don't really do that great of a job with Exchange when compared to Outlook for Windows.

 

[colourfastt]

Exchange is a Microsoft product; OS X is an Apple product. You do the math.

 

[vistadude]

I don't think many companies can keep up with Microsoft's development of exchange, including it's VOIP, instant messaging, and "unified" messaging (Lync).

 

[MikhailT]

As far as I can tell there's outlook (horribly overpriced) and Apple Mail. What's the holdup? There are some outstanding mail applications out there but they only support pop or imap and not EWS. Is this a microsoft problem?

The EWS protocol is one of the most complex protocols to support, have severe license restrictions and really, doesn't have a lot of *casual* users. To support business customers, you'd often have to sign contracts to provide support for those users . Most startups don't have the resources to do any of those things, so they'll go after for the majority of the markets and that's IMAP, which on its own is very difficult to support but you get paychecks quicker than other protocols.

Most of the business customers that uses Exchange are going to be provided with a copy of Outlook and/or asked by the IT departments to use Apple's email or outlook.

IT departments often don't have the resources to support other apps, so they'll stick with the default clients as often as they can.

 

[tanyet]

Thanks for the explanation. That explains things very well. I guess I can still hope...

 

[whtrbt7]

Apple Mail still kinda blows for Exchange. There are sporadic sync issues as well as fragmented access to contacts, calendar, and mail. Mail needs a few fixes still in order to work well with the latest Exchange version. That said, iCloud isn't so smooth either so I think it has to do with the Mail cache and also the way Mail is built. Then again, I think Outlook on Windows also has some niggles here and there with Exchange sync.