I’ve had the iPhone since it’s release, and I have been extremely satisfied. One of the barriers to use for many people is their work’s corporate email system. Many places use Microsoft’s Exchange server, which interfaces with Outlook. The iPhone can support these servers if they have the IMAP feature turned on, but many companies lock their email behind a firewall, only allowing a few select ways to get access to your email from outside the companies. One of these ways is typically to use Blackberry’s service, which the iPhone doesn’t support. Another is to use Outlook Web Access, which does work on the iPhone, but the experience is suboptimal and not integrated with the standard e-mail software.

Recently, someone at work discovered a Java based program called MrPostman. This program runs on any computer connected to the internet (including your home computer). It serves as a bridge to link Outlook Web Access (as well as many other web-based email systems) to POP, an standard email access protocol. You configure your iPhone to connect to your home computer, and MrPostman takes care of getting your corporate mail via Outlook Web Access. It’s not perfect: the scripts and settings may require a bit of fine-tuning to work with your company’s email. It’s not IMAP, so it doesn’t really sync with your Outlook account (if you delete messages in Outlook after they have been downloaded to your iPhone, they won’t automatically get deleted from your iPhone), but it works fairly well.

Another option is Synchronica,  a paid service that basically does the same thing, but uses IMAP (to keep your iPhone and Outlook account in sync) and does the job of hosting the mail server so you don’t have to run anything on your home computer. No word yet on pricing, but there’s a free trial. I tried it out, but Synchronica is getting hammered by users and doesn’t really seem ready for the load. It was too slow to be usable. That said, it may be worth a second look in a few weeks.