Many, if not most, companies are either moving services to the cloud, or at the very least discussing this internally. Moving your email to the cloud might have many benefits. The most significant benefit is probably cutting costs by not having to allocate resources on maintaining these servers.
If you are a Microsoft-shop and are currently running an on-site deployment of Microsoft Exchange, you might be tempted to switching to Microsoft’s (fairly) new BPOS service. The pricing for BPOS is a bit higher than Google Apps, with a price-tag at $10/user/month (compared to Google Apps Premium at $50/year), but if you want to stay with Exchange you might consider this cheap.
I’m actually surprised nobody has posted anything about this online, but it’s more or less possible to write an IMAP proxy for Facebook using their API. Sure, you could not write a full-fledge IMAP implementation, but you could get it to perform the most basic tasks, like reading messages (and therefore also store them locally).
There are quite a few crappy email providers out there. If you did not pay attention when you chose your email provider, chances are that your email provider sucks. I’ve compiled a brief check-list for you that you can use to determine if your email provider sucks and that it’s time to move elsewhere.
The iPhone was launched without the capability to search emails. It took until iPhone OS 3.0 for this feature to be introduced. Unfortunately, the search feature is still limited to the headers (i.e. to, from, subject etc). You are not able to search the body of the messages (full-text search). This is a quite severe limitation, in particular for mobile business users.
Imagine this scenario: your boss sends an e-mail, and he needs a “yes” or “no” answer immediately. If you use a Gmail or Google Apps account with your iPhone, the e-mail won’t drop into your iPhone inbox immediately, even if you use IMAP to sync your e-mail. This has caused many users to devise