Mail4Exchange - Good, But Not For Me
Mail4Exchange was recently made available for the Nokia N95, enabling near-push email on this device. I’m quickly seeing my email intake increase, so I thought it would be a cool idea to toy with. Through the help of several people on Jaiku, I was finally able to figure out how I wanted it setup.
You can read the gory details after the break. For those not in a reading mood, I’m uninstalling it, after a full week and a half of use. It’s a great app, and does what it says it’s going to, but it’s just not easy enough for me…..
For the purposes of this experiment, I forwarded my Gmail to my Outlook Exchange hosting service. This annoys the heck out of me because I like to keep a clean inbox. One thing I hate about Gmail is the fact that there aren’t any folders, and it’s impossible to "browse" through emails that you’ve archived. You have to search for them, which means you have to remember a word in them somewhere.
First off, I used Mail2Web for my Outlook Exchange hosting. It’s free, and somewhat guided to setup. I bumped into some hiccups here and there, but it’s a relatively straightforward site, and again, it’s free. Hard to complain. They give you a great Outlook webmail setup, and then you can setup a mobile WAP version to access, or setup your Mail4Exchange client to access your mail.
I downloaded and installed Mail4Exchange on my Nokia N95. Real easy to get all that done, you can get your copy here or directly through the Download! app on your device. Please note that you must select T-mobile, and not Cingular. I don’t know why, could be ’cause AT&T’s stupid about things like this.
Plug in your settings and you’re ready to rock. Mail4Exchange doesn’t necessarily keep a live data connection open, but it does check seemingly constantly, and alerts you when you get something new. It was pretty quick, as well. There’s very little delay.
There are 2 settings, "Peak" and "Off-Peak". Basically, two synchronization profiles. I set my Peak to be always-on, M-F, 730a-11p. Nice to be able to set such specific time frames. Off-Peak (weekends) I just set to manual, meaning that I would have to manually tell it to sync. This is the most convenient for me.
Attachments come through nicely, and integration into your device is tight. I have "New Message" set to my right softkey, and I noticed that "Mail For Exchange" was added as an option. The mailbox appears in the Messaging app, and new email notifications are system default.
The app completely syncs with the Outlook Web Access through Mail2Web. If I read an email on my device, it’s marked as read online. I like that alot. However, unfortunately, with my setup, I was unable to compose messages, as it would have shown as coming FROM my Mail2Web account, which I don’t want. I have both my personal and blog email accounts filtering into one Gmail account, and it’s important to me to be able to compose from either.
The only real gripe I have about the app, however, is that there’s no way to mark emails, or select multiples, and there’s no way to mark one as read. Thus, I had to open the email in order for it to be marked as read. Really annoying if you already know what the email says, or just want to mark it as read for whatever reason.
Battery life was fine. I was easily able to get through an entire 8hr workday with it checking email all day, and other regular usage. Not bad for the N95, especially. RAM usage is negligible.
If you’ve got a way to get Mail4Exchange setup pure, without forwarding from another account, I’d say it’s an awesome option. For me, I think I’m just going to stick with the Gmail app. The only thing that sucks is I can’t get notified with it, I have to check it.
What are your experiences with Mail4Exchange on your Nseries device? Do you use it currently? What else would you like to know about how it works, or real-world usage stats?
Hey can’t you select multiple emails by holding down the ‘pencil’ key and scrolling? Unsure on mark as read though.
Mail4Exchange would be perfect for me if it could sync multiple folders and search the GAL.
I have been experimenting with Funambol. It is slightly more robust than the gmail client I used to have installed ( unlocked RAZR V3i ):
http://my.funambol.com
Currently in an “invitation only beta”, but know that I received my invite the day after requesting it.
I can see Funambol becoming my mobile email server/client application of choice ( read: open source ). Check it out, see what you think.
reference: http://www.funambol.com/opensource/
I had the same multiple select problem with BBC. It allows multiple selection, but I can not do important functions like mark selected as read. So far only Blackberry has figured out all the “important” e-mail functions. IMO, RIM devices are lame.
You can set your N95 to pop your Gmail account but you can’t send from the phone through Gmail. But if you need a notification about new mails I would suggest seting up a popaccount for your gmail in the phones email client. Works phine for me. Or at least when I tried it.
mail2web has a feature that allows you to send from the phone and have it look like it originated at gmail (or any other mail account you own). It isn’t free but it only costs about $2 per month. I’ve been using this setup with M4Ex very successfully for about a year.
I have the Nokia N82 and it works great although for some reason, when I receive HTML formatted emails, they don’t show up. In other words, the email comes through but its blank and there is no way to “fetch” the HTML portion out to read. Weird.