Push-email now available

[geoffreycross]

Hi,

I'm rather excited to announce the very early stage alpha release of my push-email client which has been an ongoing fun project of mine ever since I dumped my Blackberry for an i-mate Jam (actually I went via a Treo with Chatter which was almost as good as the Blackberry).

What I have implemented is a IMAP transport which supports the IDLE extension. Therefore if you mail server provides IMAP access (many do) you can probably have push-email on your Pocket PC without running exchange and without any intermediaries. And obviously as this is IMAP, all new email and changes are synchronized both directions on your desktop and your PDA. This is only a 'transport' and so you will still use Outlook (or any other MAPI client) as your user-interface.

Now a few comments:

• The code is in a pretty early stage, but I have personally been running it for a while now without any problems. I know of a few bugs, and will put up a bug-tracker sometime over the next couple of days; in the meantime, please post here for help and bug reports.
  
  I have tested the IMAP implementation against a few different servers, but there might be some issues. Please post here if you have problems and I'll provide you with a debug version which will allow you to help me diagnose the problem.
  
  A few of the main limitations of the current release: 1) only incoming email (sending is now my top priority for the next release); 2) only one mailbox (and it must be your INBOX) can be synchronized; 3) no attachments at the moment.
  
  Battery life of your PDA will obviously be limited, as a socket connection is kept open. However, I have personally found there to be very little difference under normal usage.
  
  Clearly you need to have a 'data plan' from your provider, and under normal usage the IMAP client will be transmitting data on a regular basis. So if you pay per MB, this is going to cost you. I have been careful to keep this to an absolute minimum, but it will obviously depend on how much email you receive. In 'idle' mode (i.e. with no incoming or outgoing email), the traffic will be less 0.5kB per hour.
  
  There is no particular reason why this shouldn't run on other Pocket PCs. However as I have only tested it on my i-mate Jam, I'll have to leave that up to the patient and brave for the moment (if you do try and have problems, please post or email me, as I'm hoping to provide support for as many phones as possible including Smartphones).
  
  I will eventually support WM5. Why bother as there is already push-email provided with WM5? Because this way you don't have to have an Exchange email server!

So enough from me. If you're still willing to give this ago, I'd very much appreciate your feedback. I've put the downloads and some brief installation instructions here:

http://www.vgsmail.com/ppc/

Hope this works for you!

Geoff.

[Pyrofer]

Hi, the 512bytes an hour sounds good, but some providers 'round up' the data, im not sure what rules they follow, and by how much or how often. But you may find that it ends up being 100k an hour because of this rounding.

Does anybody know how to find out the rounding rules for networks in the UK such as Orange and O2 ?

[geoffreycross]

FWIW, T-mobile UK don't round and simply compute the 'total' over a full month.

[bruins3]

I'm verry glad I live in The Netherlands. T-mobile NL has a flat rate plan for GPRS/WIFI/UMTS only €9,50 without limitations, even no fair use. As much data as you want. The only limitation is the max. bandwith for UMTS (64KB). Doesn't matter since the MDA has no UMTS.

Greetz,

Giovanni

[oltp]

Hi geoffreycross,

This could be what I'm waiting for. But i cannot get it to work properly. First installed it to storage following your steps and got an error that it couldn't get a socket. After soft-reset I got the error that it couldn't open MAPI interface. Reinstalled it to main, recreated the mailaccount in different orders nothing changed. Errorlog is greyed out, so please send some debug code.

I'm on flatfee TMO, so the data costs or no problem.

Looking forward to your answer,

M

[geoffreycross]

oltp:

I have PM-ed you with a debug version. I forget my email address on the original post. If you have bugs, you will get the fastest turnaround if you email them to ppcbugs@vgsmail.com

The transport can definitely not be installed onto a storage card and I would recommend trying. I'm not sure about the client executable, but I doubt it (and it's pretty small anyway!). I am surprised it worked at all. However the problem does not sound like it is related to the storage card. I'll give a full diagnosis when I see the debug trace.

Geoff.

[herman3101]

only just installed this program, seems to work with Leeds Uni imap accounts. excellent solution to a much overlooked inconvenience.

Who needs BlackBerry with this little gem.

Cheers

[k_kirk]

Geoff, this looks great! Thanks for your efforts! Question I have is how this solution differs from the existing functionality in the built-in mail client to connect and get mail every x minutes? My understanding is that this is still a pull solution driven by the pocketpc keeping an open socket and querrying the IMAP server on a regular intervals. Am I missing the obvious here? Regards & Thanks

[k_kirk]

Edited to remove duplicate post. Have no clue how I did that. Apologies.

[FOSA]

GREAT WORK!


Make it works with Gmail and Yahoo Mail and it'll become GREATER!


Keep up the good work