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MAPI or not MAPI?

That’s what William Shakespeare would’ve asked if he were tech support today. The answer, though, is MAPI because we’ve just successfully completed another upgrade on our Hosted Exchange platform!

Following the service announcements on the 15th of February, we’ve carried out and successfully completed the works to introduce MAPI to our Hosted Exchange platform and do away with the older RPC. I know this may sound like gibberish to some, but here’s why it’s a good thing…

So, firstly, what do these super nerdy-sounding acronyms mean? RPC is Remote Procedure Call and it is used to essentially gain information from one program to another without having to be on the same network or a pre-established relationship. It’s a means to connect, basically, and we used it to allow your devices to connect to our Exchange server. MAPI is Messaging Application Programming Interface which is now replacing RPC for communicating with Exchange servers.

So, why the change? Why fix something that isn’t broken? Well, it’s not a fix, it’s an upgrade. IT 101 is to ensure your systems are as up-to-date as possible for the best end-user experience. That’s long story short. MAPI will allow for emails to be delivered faster to users. So, it’s already more efficient. But, as well as that, it’s more stable and thus there’s a stronger communication from your mail client to our mail server. As is key to any relationship, communication is arguably the most important thing, right?!

MAPI also enabled future innovation in authentication by using a HTTP based protocol. This means it will be easier to add any new security features. I think everyone can agree that in the digital age, as much security as possible is a good thing – even if it can be a bit annoying at times.

Another useful feature following the change is that there will be faster reconnect times following a break. This is because there are only TCP connections that need to be re-established, not RCP. A few key instances where this will be useful are when a device is awoken from hibernation and when switching from a wired network to a wireless or cellular network.

So, we hope you have a pretty good idea of why we made this change. Everything we do has its reasons even if it doesn’t seem so! We are constantly striving to ensure we provide the best experience and platform for all our users so do expect more works to come.

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