Treo Mail

august 12, 2005

One of the big functions that I wanted on my Treo 600 is email. The built-in email client works good, it's reliable, but it only supports POP3 mail collection. And although POP3 support is nice, I like to keep all my mail centrally on my server. I don't want to be mucking around deleting email on two machines, that's too much work for me (and I am far too lazy to try to keep the two in sync). So, I tried Snappermail which had IMAP support. Snappermail worked OK, its IMAP support worked fine. But, a few things bothered me. It got mail like a POP3 client -- you checked for mail every so often, when there was mail, it got downloaded. It was a polling IMAP client, which was fine. The thing about Snappermail was that it often locked up my Internet connection, forcing me to turn off and on my radio to get a connection again. Everyday I would have to reset the radio in order to get mail or surf the web. It was quite annoying. I tried Chatter Email and deleted Snappermail a few days ago. And Chatteremail is what I am using now. It does not look as fancy as Snappermail, but it sure does work better. Its IMAP client supports the IDLE command (if your server supports it also). Basically, that means that the connection to the server is held open after the initial check, then when email arrives at the server, the server will instantaneously let the Chatteremail client know new mail has arrived. Chatteremail then goes and picks up the email in the background -- no "getting mail" status bars. This works out great since it is not polling, it is just passively waiting for the server to give a signal when email has arrived -- this makes it work much like the Blackberry devices and it is in all essense push-email. And the other nice thing is that I have been running Chatteremail for few days now and my Internet connection has been fine so far.


<< back || ultramookie >>