"My Palm Experience" Blog: Day 8

[Brandon Miniman]

At long last, I’ve made some progress in getting the Palm 700p to sync with my exchange account. One of our noble readers reminded me that there is some extra software that came with the 700p, one being called VersaMail, which will indeed sync with Exchange.

And so I dug up the 700p box, and sure enough, at the bottom, was a CD that I haven’t used before which contained VersaMail.

VersaMail worked very well after configuring it to work with my 4Smartphone Exchange ( http://www.4smartphone.net/Affiliates.aspx?go=referral&ref=BM56140) account. My appointments and contacts were immediately loaded onto the device over the air. Even the category colors remained in tact. What didn’t work, though, was email, because I have all of my emails in sub-folders, and VersaMail only pulls mail from the main Inbox folder.

So what I have now is the device syncing every few minutes, but I still don’t have email. I’m experimenting with a piece of mail called SnapperMail which promises to offer even more options for emailing, but only works with Exchange accounts that can use the IMAP protocol. More on this later.

Navigation: Day 1 (http://www.pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=news&id=3678), Day 2 (http://pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=news&id=3682), Day 3 (http://pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=news&id=3686), Day 4 (http://pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=news&id=3692), Day 5 (http://pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=news&id=3698), Day 6 (http://pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=news&id=3703), Day 7 (http://pocketnow.com/index.php?a=portal_detail&t=news&id=3720)

[Cloudscout]

It's unfortunate that you can't sync Exchange folders via ActiveSync in VersaMail (at least I've never figured out a way to do it), but as you said, you can do so via IMAP in SnapperMail.

The thing is, you can do this via IMAP in VersaMail, too. VersaMail supports IMAP and POP3 accounts in addition to Exchange accounts. You could set up a second "instance" of your Exchange account in VersaMail that connects via IMAP. This would give you access to your folders.

It seems clumsy to have two instances of the same mail account set up (one to get your ActiveSync functionality and the other to get your mail folders), but no clumsier than actually running two separate mail programs.

[Brandon Miniman]

I agree that it's clumsy. I wish there was just some easy way to do what I'm trying to achieve!

[Cloudscout]

I do, too. I'm debating a switch back to the 700w just so I can have better access to my email.

Maybe I'm too picky, but there are some things that I can't figure out about phone feature sets.

I was thrilled with the upgrade from the Treo 600 to the Treo 650. Having Bluetooth and OTA sync for mail/calendar was great. I really wanted EV-DO, though... and a better camera... and I wanted my contacts to sync OTA.

The 700W gave me all three of those features, but they seriously crippled it by giving it so little RAM. I'm using the 700p right now, but I'm not pleased with the Exchange integration and I'm regularly tempted to throw it out the window due to the freeze-up-after-SMS-send problem.

I like the threaded SMS on the 700p, but it's not worth having the phone lock up for 60 seconds if I get too many messages in my history.

[Brandon Miniman]

Ah yes... the freeze up after SMS issue, I forgot about that one. I've had the device freeze in other instances when using USB modem... it's not the most stable device.

[Globeseek]

You could of course try ChatterEmail which will direct connect to your exchange server -- and get push notices from it --

just a thought ....

no server / no plugin / no desktop redirect -- just a push connection to exchange server 2000 and above