POutlook and Automatic Send/Receive problem
 

After fighting with FlexMail, I have switched back to POutlook. I am connecting to 4 IMAP accounts, and am polling them every 30 minutes. Doing this seems to result in reasonable battery life of my Mogul.

However, I am amazed to find that there doesn't seem to be any way to tell Outlook that I don't want it to poll right now. With FlexMail (or Chatter on my Treo) if I close the email app, even if it is configured for polling, it won't check for email. Only when it is up and running (or minimized in the background) it checks for new mail.

Is there any way to temporarily disable the checking for email? I have tried closing both Messaging and ActiveSync, and have turned off the data connection via the Comm Mgr, and it will still check for mail once the next 30 minute period begins.

That's the way it's designed to work since the whole point of these devices is not to miss any messages. With push e-mail you could set up schedules for sync'ing. You could keep your IMAP accounts to send messages but forward incoming messages to a free push/Exchange account (mail2web) in order to this.

If not, you may want to try killing both poutlook.exe and tmail.exe processes with a tool like MemMaid. This may stop it from running but they will probably start themselves after POutlook is started.

I'm not even sure this works, and it could also affect SMS.

Well, yes, within reason. I have large periods of the day where I don't need my phone checking email (while I am a home, at work). I mainly need it checking email when I am at a customer site or, well, whenever I am not at home or work. Even some customer sites allow me to plug my laptop in so I don't need it then either. I wish POutlook/Messaging worked like Outlook on my desktop - I can just close it out and it stops checking.

It seems like an unnecessary waste of battery life.

I have tried mail2web, but it just doesn't work well with how I manage my email. Plus I already have a push account through a customer that I need to monitor.

Flexmail was ok, but it had its issues and I suspect that its IMAP IDLE implementation is not very battery friendly. Plus its activesync support didn't work very well (most of the time the emails it sent via Exchange were blank).

one solution would be to have it set to never check and when you are somewhere it is needed just manually check it every 30 min. otherwise i dont think there is a way to get it to stop polling, unless you constantly change the settings
________
Diamanda