It’s marketed as a business service, but as consumers get more email savvy, the advantages of having a Hosted Exchange Server Account become more clear to people like you and me.

There are 5 different classes of mobile phone user on Metro-North.

1. The guy with the Blackberry and Microsoft Exchange Hosting Account handling all of his email effortlessly before he even gets to work.
2. The guy in the army jacket, auditioning .50 Cent ringtones for the entire train car on his RAZR.
3. The guy with the iPhone who spends 2 minutes every morning trying to surf the web on it, gets frustrated by how slow EDGE is, and then puts it away while he listens to Emo-rock.
4. The woman who is talking to her kids on her Treo in her loud ‘mommy voice’.
5. You, you dork, sitting there with the free phone you and your girlfriend got with a pre-paid 2-for-1 plan you bought out of a no-name Port Chester reseller storefront, and she has since left you but is still using all your shared minutes and you still get the bill, and you just sit there the whole ride and stare at her name in your contact list with your thumb on the DELETE button. As if you had the balls. You disgust me. Get out of here and go reload her Facebook page every 10 seconds, loser - and yes, she *is* sleeping with the guy who started writing on her wall a week before you broke up. DUH.

This post is to help you get in the #1 spot, because, cmon, its a much better place for your head, bro.

For Metro-North commuters who don’t have a corporate-issued Blackberry, the advantages of having the combination of a Blackberry with a personal Microsoft Exchange Hosting Account is largely unknown.

• If your company gives you a Blackberry, it is probably already set up with a your corporate Microsoft Exchange account.
• If you bought a Blackberry at a Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile store, they probably sold it to you without a Microsoft Exchange Hosting Account and never even tried to sell you one.
• If you bought your Blackberry from a local reseller, especially one who caters to local small businesses (Hint: look for a ‘Nextel’ sign in the window), they very may well have tried to resell a Microsoft Exchange Hosting Account when you bought your Blackberry from them.

I had my first Blackberry for a year before I got my first personal Microsoft Exchange Hosting Account. It was only after I added this that I realized the full power of the device I had been using every day for a year.

Here’s what you usually get, although offers vary among resellers:

1. A free downloadable copy of Outlook 2007 on as many computers as you like - if your Microsoft Exchange Hosting provider doesn’t offer this free with signup, look elsewhere (unless you already have it).
2. No matter how many copies of Outlook you use, your mailbox stays perfectly synced and organized across computers and Blackberrys in realtime, without you doing anything. Its not like other sync solutions - it ‘just works’. It amazes me how I have never had an issue with it.
3. Email is *pushed* to you as it comes in, there is no ‘polling’ every x minutes. You can appear to be ‘working from home’ while at the movies, because you can respond to email instantly.
4. You don’t have to be online like with Gmail to work with your email, because when it syncs local copies of your email synced all the time.
5. You usually also get free access to Outlook Web Access, which you probably have never seen before - its basically your Outlook from any web browser. Like any other Microsoft Exchange client, any changes you make are reflected on all your other clients.

The only downside is that there is no free lunch - Microsoft Exchange Server is a premium service with a monthly fee. However, as more and more consumers are getting personal Microsoft Exchange Server accounts, the number of providers who cater to consumers is growing and the pricing gets more competitive - so shop around.