Replace your Blackberry with a Treo 600 – IMAP and Push on a Treo

I’ve recently started using a new mail program that seems to satisfy almost all of my email needs for a phone.  It is still in beta, but works very well and should get even better as the developer fixes things and hones it according to users’ suggestions.  The program is called Chatter.

I bought a Treo 600 from a friend back in June and have been looking for an email application that would work in a way similar to my old phone, a Sidekick, and/or the famed corporate RIM Blackberry.  These devices use a couple of features that make remote email retrieval really work well:

“Push” is a term used to denote that your email arrives at your device by the server sending it rather then you specifically telling your device to go check for email.  One advantage is that you aren’t wasting time and battery power checking if there’s no new mail.  An even bigger advantage is that when mail gets received by your mail server, it shows up on your device almost immediately.  No waiting for the 5, 10 or 15 minute interval when your phone is set to go check for new mail.

IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol.  It is just a method of communication between a mail server and your computer or phone, the “client.”  In essence, with IMAP your mail program becomes a type of viewer of information that resides on the server.  Many people use a different protocol, called POP, which normally retrieves your mail to a local machine or device.  The problem with this is that once it’s retrieved off the server, if you home to read it on ANOTHER device, you can’t.  With IMAP everything is kept online on the server and can be accessed my as many different methods as you want simultaneously.  So I can be viewing mail on my desktop at work, go out for a walk and see the same exact mail on my phone.  Everything is synchronized.  If I send email on my phone, it gets put in my “sent items” and when I get back to the office, it’s right there in the folder named “sent items.”  If I read a new message on my phone, it gets marked read on the server so when I get back to the office and look at my mail on my PC, again, it shows it has been read.  And so forth.  What this means is that you don’t have to worry about managing mail from one place to another.  Everything is saved in a central location so whatever you do on whatever device you’re using, it’s immediately visible on all other devices.  This may not seem like that big a deal to some, but for those of us who actually hold onto old email and want to keep a record of both sent and received mail, it takes a huge amount of the work and thinking out of the process.  Back a few years ago before I knew of ways to get an IMAP account, I had to transfer a large outlook data file up to my web server each morning, download it when I got to work, then repeat the process for the trip back home.  If I forgot or was not able to transfer stuff, I would have to open two outlook files simultaneously so that I could transfer the mail that wasn’t synched from the previous period.  Now all of that becomes irrelevant!

The Treo was not made for these types of technology from the ground up.  The PalmOS5 operating system that runs on the Treo does not do multithreading, so it has a hard time doing more than one thing at a time.  There are probably a good dozen or so email applications out there for the Treo and I’ve tried many of them.  They all have their advantages and disadvantages for the most part, and that’s probably why there isn’t one dominant one.  But soon there may be, as you shall see.  Here are a run down of the major contenders:

Palm’s Mail App:  this is the program that comes with the Treo.  It only does POP, but it is one of the few that can actually check for mail in the “background” – meaning while you are doing other things with the Treo, or while the Treo is “off.”

Versamail: PalmOne makes this application, which does IMAP but not push.  It works reasonably well except that for the Treo, you really should be able to use the 5-way navigator buttons, but Versamail doesn’t support those yet.  So you end up having to take out the stylus to do anything, and this becomes more effort than its worth.  Another problem I have with Versamail is that there isn’t good product support.  There are no online forums, and you have no idea when new versions might come out that would fix something.  This is kind of a pet peave for me, but I really appreciate it when I can talk to the developer in some way.

MailWave:  this is a new mail program that has some promise – it does IMAP and push, but as with most of the push solutions for the Treo, it isn’t real push, but a workaround using SMS.  What happens is that Mailwave sits between your mailserver and your Treo.  It actually retrieves your mail first and if it sees something new, it sends a text message to your phone.  This has advantages and disadvantages.  The main advantage is that even if your phone isn’t getting a data signal, it can still receive these messages.  The main disadvantage, I’ve found, is that these messages aren’t very reliable.  Sometimes they come in immediately, sometimes they take 20 minutes or more, and sometimes they don’t come in at all.  This may be a problem with T-Mobile’s implementation of SMS, or the local networks around here, who knows.  The other issue is that if you are like me and receive a lot of email, you get barraged constantly with messages popping up on your phone which you then have to click ok to clear.  Finally, the cost of Mailwave can get prohibitive – instead of charging a one-time fee for the application, they charge a monthly fee of $7.  After 10 months, you’ve already spend more than the most expensive of the mail programs save for the truly corporate solutions.  Mailwave does, unlike all but the corporate solutions, allow one to actually synch one’s calendar events if one Exchange account, like the Blackberry does.  I’ll address Exchange in the Corporate Solutions section below.
 
Snappermail:  up until recently this was one of the better pop email programs.  It outshines most of the programs out there because it has great support for both html email and attachments, which you can view or download via the program.  A few months ago Snapper introduced a beta of its next version which included IMAP support.  I have been primarily using this beta for the last month or so and it has worked fairly well for me.  The two disadvantages are that when you send a message it doesn’t synch to your sent folder on your account, so you have to send a bcc to yourself and then manually put it in your sent folder when you get back to your PC (though some claim that their IMAP accounts have been smart enough to put it there automatically).

Corporate solutions:  there are a number of high-end corporate applications/services out there that that are targeted at businesses more than individuals.  They often involve installing applications on the server itself, and so really can only done by someone who has access to that server – in other words a systems administrator for a corporation.  These solutions tend to be very pricey and aren’t a matter of simply installing a program on your phone and voila!  But, these also have the advantage that they can synchronize more than just your email.  Like the Blackberry, they can synch your meetings and other events, your tasks, and your contacts from your Exchange server.  Exchange is a Microsoft product that hosts email, event/meeting information, tasks, contact info, etc. for individuals and companies.  One normally sees Exchange servers in large companies, but one can also set up a personal Exchange “account” only for your personal use at various Exchange hosting services.  Microsoft Outlook is the normal way you access all this information, but one can also access it via a web browser.  The ability to get at this information via a phone, and have it sync with the server on a continual basis is what has made the Blackberry such a critical device for so many companies out there.  RIM, the company that makes the Blackberry, is in talks with various device manufacturers, like PalmOne, to produce software for these devices.  So we may yet see “Blackberries” which aren’t the actual “Blackberry” device, but something completely different like the Treo, just running Blackberry software.  Until then, the other corporate solutions out there include Visto, Seven, and to a lesser extent Mailwave.

Chatter:  this brings me to the final application and the one that really prompted this whole blog entry.  Chatter actually was developed a while ago but was called IMChatter.  It included some limited instant messaging capability, IMAP support and Push.  However, like Mailwave, IMChatter sat between your mail server and your device and would do a lot of server work.  Thus you couldn’t give it large mailboxes because that would tie up Chatter’s bandwidth.  I believe you also had a monthly subscription fee as opposed to an upfront cost.  You also had a get an account from the developer and this could take a while.  I actually tried it out a month or so ago, but found that it made my Treo so sluggish as to be unusable.  Support also seemed unreliable as messages on the discussion forum on the program’s website were not being answered. HOWEVER, Marc Blank, the developer of IMChatter, recently unveiled a new version of his application, renamed simply "Chatter."  This application is still in beta, but Marc seems very responsive to user input.  There is now a forum on Treocentral specifically devoted to this development and Marc is a regular participant.  The new version does not slow the Treo down and the interface is much nicer, and works better with the 5-way navigation buttons on the Treo.  Messages synch perfectly and immediately and the push is true push.   The notification screen when this happens only shows up if you aren’t in Chatter itself and goes away if you don’t do anything.  You can also turn it off.  The one thing that it doesn’t support is attachments, although according to Marc this is to be added as soon as early September!  The price for Chatter, once it comes out, is also very low for such a complete solution at only $20.  No recurring fees.  This seems like the holy grail that some of us power (but budget) email users have been waiting for.

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