With their free service, you can:

• Have a personal calendar, tasks list, contacts, reminders, journal
• Have 100MB of free storage
• Sync with your mobile device
• Automatically fetch emails from other accounts

The syncing happiness begins with setting up your Mail2Web Live account and configuring your devices.  If you have a Windows Mobile device, this will involve configuring ActiveSync to work with your Mail2Web service.

Alternatively, if you have a BlackBerry device, you can use the included Exchange support and Palm users can utilize VersaMail.  The ActiveSync settings are shown in the following screenshot:

There are similar solutions out there for Google Mail and other platforms, but Mail2Web Live is perfect for someone who has multiple devices to keep in sync, has a preference for Microsoft Exchange, and may already have ActiveSync on their device.

If you are seeking other hosted Exchange servers, check out web hosts who offer very inexpensive options such as RackSpace, 1and1, and WebHost4Life.

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For those of us who depend on web based mail such as Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, or Hotmail; a backup plan is necessary to keep your business running should these services go down.   Google makes this process very easy with it’s support of POP and IMAP.  If you use IMAP, you constantly have a a backup copy of your emails located on your local drive.  For those who are looking for a different solution, check out Lifehacker’s solution, or GmailSync from Nauman Leghari.

To backup your Hotmail email, the method for backing up involves using Outlook Express to get your message and then using Outlook Express to backup the messages for your archival purposes.  If anyone has any other methods for backing up Hotmail, please leave a comment and I’ll update the post. 

For users of Yahoo Mail, it appears the only way to gain downloadable access to your emails is to pay $19.99 for access to Yahoo! Plus.  Yahoo Plus will allow you to forward your mail and give you access to your mail via POP, among other features.  Once you sign up for Mail Plus, simply use your mail client’s backup facility to create a backup copy of your emails.

It would be advisable to take these service downtimes as a call to look at your email system and see how you can create some redundancy in the event your service provider is unavailable.  Another upshot of creating backups is if you decide to move do a different mail provider, you will already have your ducks in a row to easily restore your mail to the new provider.

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