Like quite a few people I tend to keep my personal and work identities slightly separate, and part of that has been maintaining a domain for email – and more recently this blog.
Back when I had a bit more time (and spare cash!) for geekery I used to maintain an Exchange server at home, mainly so I could learn about exchange but also to make use of webmail. These days I don’t bother and have just been using the POP mailboxes provided by my hosting company and Outlook. The problem is now I’m spending more of my time mobile I really miss having a decent webmail service. Especially since I’ve been messing around with Exchange 2007 at work, the freebie ones the host provides just don’t cut it.
Having done a bit of digging around the web this morning I found the Windows Live Admin Centre, or what used to be called Custom Domains. Now perhaps this is something everyone knows about, but its new to me and I’m pretty impressed. I’ve not tried it out yet, but according to this wiki article once I sign up it’ll let me point my domains MX records at the Hotmail mail servers and have my email delivered to Hotmail accounts for my domain. Sounds like a great solution to me, I can still use Outlook at home and get a decent webmail interface for when I’m mobile somewhere. I’ll be trying it out over the next few days to see how well it works.
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Stacey Derbinshire