Email options and battery life.

[Ghaleon]

Afternoon all,

I've been lurking around here for a while now, pretty much ever since I began mulling over the prospect of picking up the 700wx when it first came out. In fact, a good part of the reason I finally did was the insight I garnered from reading the forum here. Heck, I've even blatantly stolen one of Malatesta's older Today Screen layouts from another thread, heh.

Introduction aside, I've been toying with various email solutions to use with my shiny new device, and I'm looking for input from others as to other options or settings I have yet to discover or experiment with.

My goal has been to use Outlook at home and Pocket Outlook on the Treo with the same account, optionally, depending on the source, also using web mail for the aforementioned account. In addition, I'm trying to find a way to do so with a reasonable battery life; which is a daunting task considering I've been running Agile Messenger through the day as well...

Obviously the ideal solution would be to tie to my work exchange server... which was my intent from the start, unfortunately our IT services here are outsourced and our server is run by what I presume to be a hand crank who's operator is easily distracted by shiny objects; Thus, the chances of getting any sort of push services configured/email server upgraded are slim to none.

That option being ruled out, I've gone about looking at various free email services. I've been using Yahoo for a while, so their Yahoo2go app for WM devices looked like a shoe-in. Unfortunately their client requires the use of SMS every time it connects. I don't currently subscribe to an SMS plan, since such plans are woefully overpriced and it is a rare occasion I need to send such a message.

My next experiment was using gmail via POP. After fighting with the POP client magically clearing out messages upon each reconnect, and finding a workable solution posted here on these forums by Wideawake I believe, I let it run for a day through work to see how things went. This solution wasn't bad, with the exception that I could not POP to the home install of Outlook due to the fact that once a POP connection gets messages, it flags them such that another POP connection will not retrieve them. So the home Outlook and Treo cannot play along nicely, the Treo gets headers, home Outlook pops the full message (leaving a copy on the gmail server), and the next time the Treo connects, it dumps the previously acquired headers. This solution got fair battery life with the stock battery; probably somewhere around 11-12 hours checking every 15 minutes while running Agile Messenger.

The current attempt is using AOL's free email account which offers an IMAP connection. Since with IMAP you're never really downloading messages, this solved the issue with the home and Treo connections fighting over messages. Unfortunately, it appears that an IMAP connection via the Treo is harsh on the battery, and my battery life dropped to about 9-10 hours, with 15 minute mail checks and Agile Messenger. This is without doing much of anything else throughout the day with the phone, and I was getting critical battery warnings on the drive home from work.

I have yet to try the mail2web option, mostly because I'd prefer to use an @gmail.com or the personalized domain email AOL offers with their free account as opposed to an "@mail2web.com", I'm also not quite clear on what limitations their free and 1.99 accounts have. What sort of battery life could I expect using one of their accounts compared to what I've seen with the above options? Are there any other options I've missed?

At this point it's looking like my best solution is to just point my forwarding accounts toward gmail, and only use outlook to synch contacts, appointments, etc. and not use the home account for mail at all.

Any input my fellow Treo users would provide is much appreciated,
-Ghaleon

[Malatesta]

Originally Posted by Ghaleon

I have yet to try the mail2web option, mostly because I'd prefer to use an @gmail.com or the personalized domain email AOL offers with their free account as opposed to an "@mail2web.com", I'm also not quite clear on what limitations their free and 1.99 accounts have. What sort of battery life could I expect using one of their accounts compared to what I've seen with the above options? Are there any other options I've missed?
-Ghaleon

Get a mail2web account for $1.99 a month. Forward your gmail.

Under your settings in mail2web on the site, setup an SMTP Proxy so that your outgoing email address is Gmail (or whatever email you want).

Imap is more effeicient than Pop3. Exchange is more effecient than IMAP.

There is about 3% battery consumption per hour with Exchange email using Push, which is a lot better than using an auto-fetch (every X mins).

Furthermore, skip Agile messenger and go with Verichat which uses and SMS relay to keep you online vs. the "always on connection" of Agile. This will also save battery life. Agile consumes a lot of battery power if left on all day.

[Ghaleon]

Thanks Malatesta, I was unaware of the SMTP proxy service that comes along with the upgraded mail2web account, that made the decision an easy one. I've taken to not bothering with IM for the time being and have push email going; a world of difference in battery life. I'm quite a bit happier with my shiny new Treo now.

-Ghaleon

[stratoman]

If I have Yahoo! Mail Plus setup on my 700wx, if I hit "Send/Receive", is it going to try and download everything I have up on the yahoo server into the Treo?

And if it does download it, after the download is done, is it going to delete everything I have up on the server when the download is complete?

Let me explain my concern. I used to use Outlook Express a lot on my desktop (not anymore). In OE, once I set it up, it would pull in all the mail I had on the Yahoo server. In OE there is an option as to whether or not to delete the mail from the server after it is dumped inot OE. If you don't change this option to "don't delete" it will wipe out what is up on the server (did it once by accident).

------- more info for those who have the patience -------


In my new 700wx, after putting in the Real Picture patch and while in goofing around, I seemed to have setup a Yahoo! Mail Plus acount (which is great, what I wanted to do anyway, but I don't know exactly how I did it). This is a POP3 account. I can't find any option that guarantees it won't try to dump ALL of my mail account into the phone if I hit Send/Receive, and I can't find anything that guarantees it won't delete it off the server afterward.

I do see under the Options something that allows me to "Only display messages from the last X days", and an option for "Get message headers only".

Here is what I really want. I want the ability to send and receive only New messages, and I want them to stay up on the server. Due to concerns about messing up my yahoo plus mail account (since I have years of stuff on it), I'm thinking of setting up my new Sprint email account instead.

By the way, on my axim, with wifi, I had Yahoo!Go installed for a while, which was kind of interesting and seemed very useful, but it was doing things I didn't understand so I killed it until further notice.

Perhaps I should have started a new thread, but my question didn't seem worthy, so sorry for hijacking this one.