Using Google as a *free* MobileMe alternative (with push contacts & calendar) | Beau Giles
"Hi, I’m from Nuevasync. Some answers :
The ‘Exchange server verification failed’ thing can be ignored. Unfortunately Apple
chose to implement a kind of auto-magic configuration scheme where they attempt
to guess your server DNS name from your e-mail address. In our case (and I suspect
pretty much all cases) this guess will be wrong. For example if your e-mail address
is ‘foo@gmail.com’ it will try to connect to ‘gmail.com’. This won’t work and
in fact gives an SSL cert error because the cert there is for ‘mail.google.com’.
If you just tell the iPhone to ignore the SSL error, it will then get the message
that ‘gmail.com’ is not a great place to be connecting to for sync, and will allow you
to enter the correct server :
NuevaSync - Over the Air Synchronization.
On deleting calendar events on the device : we believe this should work. If it doesn’t
e-mail us at
support@nuevasync.com and we will investigate. (I just tried it myself
and it worked as expected).
The #1 problem we have at present is google locking our users’ accounts with the
‘captcha required’ error. This requires visiting a page at google to un-lock the account
(sometimes several times unfortunately). We are working on an implementation of OAuth
that we hope will avoid this issue. When the user’s account gets into this state
basically no syncing happens at all, but we have no way to flag this to the user
on their iPhone. So as far as they are concerned, we are just sucking, and not syncing
We run a script at regular intervals that finds the affected users from our server
logs and sends them an e-mail. Hopefully we can get past this problem in the next day or so.
Er, let’s see… ok on the cynicism part : we deployed the site to test and showcase
our sync protocol code. The idea was to be able to show interested OEMs that it
works, and works on a large scale. Running the service for free for a bunch of users
was therefore in our interest because it adds value to our sync code.
However, since the iPhone launch we have picked up a large number of new users.
Clearly we don’t have the resources to run the service for an infinite number of
users for free. Beyond that I really don’t have answer on the business model.
We are focusing on fixing bugs and making the service scale right now.
There is no plan to charge for the service in the immediate future.
About e-mail : we have been working on e-mail support, however that work has
taken a lower priority to dealing with the various issues that have arisen with
the existing service since the iPhone 2.0 launch. Once we clear that backlog
we will get back to work on the e-mail support. In the meantime you have e-mail
with IMAP.
About giving us your password : this won’t be necessary once we have our
OAuth code in place (in a few days, we hope).
Does the first sync take a long time : no, a few seconds, unless you have the
dreaded Captcha Required problem, see above.
Lastly : why don’t we support multiple calendars on the iPhone ? Well we simply didn’t
realize that they existed. We’re researching how they work and hope to get that feature
deployed soon.
I think I answered all the un-answered questions. Please send any more questions to
our support alias. I may re-read here later, but I might forget. There are quite a few
forums (fora?) and blogs now that we need to keep track of."
Works quite well, changes on my iPhone appears on my Work Outlook, and vice-versa.
Seems to work fine - I've done this for myself and for my wife. It's all free, at least for now. 
