Well over ten years ago, I did one of the stupidiest things in my life: I bought a Schroff eurorack 19″ server cabinet (>1000 euro) for my semi-indoor verandah, and signed up for a fixed SDSL Internet connection (300 euro/month, but oh my God was it fast: 1 Mb/s in both directions).

Sounds crazy, but remember kids: this was a decade before 20 euro/month virtual root servers, or 45 euro/month 50 Mb/s VDSL Internet pipes.

I actually had such a glass doored rack on my verandah!

In the rack I kept several linux computers, running my own name server, postfix smtp server, and cyrus imap server. I learned a lot, but as time went by I realized that my most scarce resource was time. And when I left Stockholm for Berlin, I couldn’t really bring all that stuff with me…

So I started to use the e-mail provider FastMail (highly recommendable!), and used its address book as contact manager. Worked fine until I bought an e-mail capable cell phone, so I added Memotoo (also an excellent service!) to my service provider portfolio.

But The Times Are A Changin’… and Memotoo turned out incapable to sync with the Windows Phone, unless one made a detour via Microsoft Live Hotmail.

No way I’d handle over my precious contact/calender/task data to some freebie “service provider” like Microsoft, Google, or Facebook. But I’ve also become lazy, so what to do?

The native sync method for the Windows Phone is (of course) the (Microsoft proprietary) Exchange ActiveSync protocol. But the idea of setting up and operating Microsoft Exchange, or using a Microsoft hosted service, didn’t appeal to me the least.

Then I learned about Open-Xchange. And all pieces fell in place!

So now I’m paying 3 euro/month to highly reputable Host Europe for their product Mail Basic with the Mobility Mailbox upgrade (warning: in German! but the OX gui can be made English speaking). I’m not using the mail account though, nobody beats FastMail.

It simply works, and syncing is more or less instantaneous.