Chriscw:  I am very interested to know how this can be done as well, as

I see this coming down the pike soon enough for us.  We currently have

people coming in via a SSL-VPN and using IMAP4 from thier PCs, but more

and more are using the smartphones so there must be a way to get this

done.

I have just been asked to talk to a phone company who are trying to sell Blackberrys to my company about people being able to access their email using Blackberrys.  We discussed the option of forwarding their emails to the user@blackberry.co.uk account which nthis chap thought you got as part of the service although to be fair he seemed to know very little about blackberrys and did not himself use them...  He seemd to think that a blackberry could connect to an exchange server presumably using webmail and as far as I could tell had never heard of IMAP.

Does anyone have experience of using Blackberrys or indeed other PDAs with Mercury  and if so what is the best way, can IMAP or webmail be used.  We do currently use IMAP but not yet webmail, although it is on my to do list.

I do not desperately favour  forwarding all (or even some) of the users email if there is an alternative that would allow them to access their real email account and thus deal with each email once instead of twice.

The Blackberry can do either POP3 or IMAP4.  Here's a Verizon web site that discusses the 7250 device.  http://support.vzw.com/devices/blackberry_7250/faq.html  That said, I definitely would have that guy provide a sample for you to use so you can test it yourself.  ;-)  Not sure about the IMAP4 software though, there is a lot of bad IMAP4 software out there on cell phones.

Thanks Thomas succinct as always.

Both POP and IMAP require the BlackBerry to poll your server. Instead of that, I set up a second email account at the phone company (user@tmo.blackberry.net for T-Mobile, and user@vzw.blackberry.net for Verizon).

I also set up an alias for each user@mydomain.com in my Mercury server. Incoming email for user@mydomain.com gets copied to the user's local Mercury mailbox and also forwarded to the user's blackberry.net account. This in turn pushes the email to the BlackBerry. This avoids the polling (how often do you need to poll?) and also possible bugs in their POP and IMAP implementation.

 The alias also allows me to selectively NOT forward some email to the BlackBerry - for example, I don't need the monthly statement from Delta Airlines on the BlackBerry. I also don't forward very large emails to the Blackberry and instead send a short announcement that "you have received email from <sender> with Subject <subject>" and it's too big so you need to use your laptop". Reading a 5 Meg PDF on the BlackBerry can be painful.

So far it has worked like a charm.

Seems to me though that if you forward mail to the blackberry instead of accessing it on the server users end up having to deal with emails twice.  We have a blackberry Curve to play with at the moment BUT needless to say there are no Administrators guide and no set up instructions that we have found so far in the package.  I gather that even the 'integration' to exchange server does not really work as you only see new mails and cannot access your folders.  Still the one bring spot is the speed of the unit its impressively slow and cumbersome so we might be able to steer management towards a better system

 What would be a good smartphone to use with either IMAP or webmail should we decide to set that up.  Obviously I am looking for opinions here rather than complete cookery book recipes on how to do it with a Nokigeum 7616x iWapBerry.

The Nokia E-series.  The IMAP support is simply steller, although MercuryI is yet to add the IDLE command.  I use an E51 with bluetooth keyboard SU-8W, though the E71 has a full keyboard in miniature and adds a more comprehensive media player and the E90 of course goes right up there into communicator land.  Whatever it is, upgrade the firmware and you should be well pleased.

Cheers,

Sabahattin

We finally got a Nokia E Series phone (E-71) to play with and indeed the IMAP4 ,works, straight out of the box as it were once the account details are entered.  However we note that some emails are complete whereas others appear to be just the header information and the body is not shown at all.  It seems that plain text only messages do not display their content whereas HTML ones do.  This applies to messages from Pegasus internally or indeed from external sources.  It does not appear to be a problem with the server as messages of this type are displayed correctly if Pegasus of Thunderbird are used.

I wonder if Sabahattin or any other mobile users have seen this and know what causes it and indeed whether it can be overcome.

I have also been trying to use a Nokia E71, and have a similar experience to Chris. However, I can download the body of any email with an attachment (which is how html shows as well) rather than just html. It appears to me that this is a bug, as I can't image it being a feature.

My main reason for buying the E71 was to access my IMAP server remotely; I'm not amused! I have read that profimail works better; may try that.

Did you clear the message size limit on the phone? When larger than the limit most devices revert to retrieve only the headers.

[quote user="Peter Strömblad"]Did you clear the message size limit on the phone? When larger than the limit most devices revert to retrieve only the headers.[/quote]

The problem is with small messages, not big ones. Anything with an attachment (or html which it treats as one) displays the body. A text only message (typically much smaller) will only download the header.

I've enabled session logs in MercuryI and I have compared the logs for connections by the phone and my usual PC client on the same plain text message. It appears that MercuryI is sending the full message to the phone, so I guess the bug is in the phone failing to display it. I'm reading the logs as below:

The PC client asks

11:40:57.656: >> 75 UID fetch 664 (UID RFC822.SIZE BODY.PEEK[])<cr><lf>

MercuryI responds

11:40:57.656: << * 1 FETCH (UID 664 RFC822.SIZE 2394 BODY[] {2394}<cr><lf>

 and sends the PC client all the headers and then the body

The phone client asks

21:34:12.937: >> 21 UID FETCH 664 (UID FLAGS BODYSTRUCTURE BODY.PEEK[HEADER.FIELDS (Received Date Subject From Reply-to To Cc Bcc Message-ID Return-Receipt-To X-Return-Receipt-To Disposition-Notification-To Disposition-Notification-Options Priority X-Priority X-MSMail-Priority Importance)])<cr><lf>

MercuryI responds

21:34:12.937: << * 1 FETCH (UID 664 FLAGS (\Seen \Answered) BODYSTRUCTURE ("text" "plain" ("CHARSET" "iso-8859-1") NIL NIL "7BIT" 579 62 NIL NIL NIL) BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (Received Date Subject From Reply-to To Cc Bcc Message-ID Return-Receipt-To X-Return-Receipt-To Disposition-Notification-To Disposition-Notification-Options Priority X-Priority X-MSMail-Priority Importance)] {731}<cr><lf>

and sends the phone a limited set of headers compared to the PC - the client then asks

21:34:13.140: >> 22 UID FETCH 664 (BODY.PEEK[1]<0.20480> BODY.PEEK[1.MIME])<cr><lf>

MercuryI responds

21:34:13.140: << * 1 FETCH (UID 664 BODY[1]<0> {578}<cr><lf>

and sends the body [but the client doesn't display it]

Do these FETCH commands look right? Any comments?

 Chris

Sounds like the phone isn't wired right. But seriously there are two types of messages that sort of have a single body they look like:

<header>

<body>

and

<header with multipart definition>

<multipart>

..THe last case, has the multipart as body, meaning the body is actually twofold, and would in some cases look like:

<header with multipart definition>

Your mail client does not support multipart messages
<multipart>

 This message above, has a plain text body, AND a real body.

So in short: Does your PDA/Phone not display text messages of a certain typ, or text messages that are within an actual multipart (treating the body as the first empty row ? - or ?

And what does the phone support say about the message? - you can save the .cnm message and send it to them for analysis, or, yourself, try and receive it via pop3, and see if that makes any change.

Thank you, Peter. It appears that any message in multipart form will display properly, while any which is not multipart will only display the header. I haven't found any yet which behave differently to that.

I've sent a message to Nokia support but had no response yet.

I have a reply from Nokia support.

"I have tested this on a Nokia E71 and when an email is received with an attachment, it will display the contents of the email. However, if the email sent is a plain text email, only the header would be displayed. This is actually a feature of Nokia E71 and there are no settings that can be changed on the Nokia mobile phone."

Claiming a bug as a feature is a well known trick but I've never seen it done as blatantly as that.

Glad I'm a Swede and not a Fin, though using HTC ... - but seriously, this is the problem with big organizations, you very much need contact and confidence chats with the guys close to development. Nothing is perfect.

Chris,

That makes sense to me and fits in with what we saw.  We may well opt to try out POP3 when we actually roll out the phones to see if that works better.

Thanks for your personal message by the way.

Chriscw:  I am very interested to know how this can be done as well, as I see this coming down the pike soon enough for us.  We currently have people coming in via a SSL-VPN and using IMAP4 from thier PCs, but more and more are using the smartphones so there must be a way to get this done.

Gromit