Email on the PocketPC

Why bother?

Why on earth would you want to do your email on a tiny screen, laboriously pecking out your words of wisdom with a pen? Only the most geeky have put up with the frustrations of email on a PDA...but there are some advantages to doing some of your email via your PocketPC:

Firstly, you can quite easily configure your PocketPC for simply sending email messages. Quite often I find that, during a long and boring meeting, I need to send a brief email about something that arisen from the agenda - previously I would set myself a Task to remind me to do this and then later send the email from my desktop. However, many such messages are quite short and this two step process is redundant. Now I simply compose the short message directly on my PocketPC and click on Send. That's all I have to do...next time my device is synchronised with the desktop, my message is placed in the Outbox of my regular email on MS Outlook and sent out with the regular mail automatically. A copy is placed automatically in the main Sent Mail file.

Secondly, much of what we do with email these days is simply scanning and deleting/forwarding or making brief one sentence replies. Again, during boring meetings or other slack times, it is easy to bring up the mail and rapidly browse the heap. The beauty of doing this is that when your Inbox is synchronised with your main desktop Inbox, deletions that you made on your device are replicated on the desktop so you don't have to do two lots of mail housekeeping.

Thirdly, I occasionally will have the need to refer back to a recently received important message. Rather than fire up the desktop (and typically I'm nowhere near this when I need to access this all important message anyway), I simply bring up the mail on my PocketPC, where I can refer to this same message, with attachments if needed.

Configuring ActiveSync

The first thing you need to do is to set up ActiveSync so that it knows what to do with your mail. The PocketPC Inbox works best with MS Outlook on the desktop - they can be made to work almost seamlessly together (unusual for a Microsoft product, I know!). However, you can also configure it to work with other email clients and methods - see below.

As mentioned above, it is quite simple to set up your Inbox for outgoing mail only - this is probably the most useful way for most people. First, connect your device and synchronise as usual - if this is the first time you have done this, you will be presented with a dialog similar to this.

Otherwise, if you have synchronised before, you will see a similar list of services listed as Information Types - make sure that the Inbox is checked. Next, with the highlighter bar on Inbox, click on the Settings button and you will next see the following dialog:

To limit your mail to send-only, then uncheck the Inbox folder options and make sure that both Outbox folder options are checked, as in this next example:

Click on OK to accept the changes and finish the process with default answers.

Using your device in Send-only mode simplifies email handling - it means that you can occasionally use your device for composing a quick email that will be sent out with your next main mail batch, after you synchronise, without having to worry about any other details about your Inbox or mail in general. For most users, this will cover 80% of situations.

If you use MS Outlook on your desktop as your regular email program, then configuring ActiveSync to handle your mail on your device as well is still quite easy. In the above steps, simply check off the options that make sense for you - the default settings of 100 lines and 5 days etc work well for most users. As mentioned above, the synchronisation works quite well - if you delete a message on your device, then during synchronisation it is deleted from your main mail box too.

ActiveSync only uses your main Inbox folder on the desktop and does not synchronise with other sub-folders. This limitation can be used to your advantage and there are other solutions available if it is important to synchronise your sub-folders - project participants can email me for more details on this if needed.

Composing an Email

This is really simple in principle but there are one or two tips that make life easier. First bring up the mail applet by clicking on the Inbox icon on the Start menu. Next click on New in the bottom left corner.

On the top line, enter the addressee in To: -- there are some nifty things which help you out here, so that you don't need to remember the recipient's email address. You can simply type enough of their name or email address to identify them - if there is ambiguity, when you press Send, the Inbox will prompt you with matching addresses so you can resolve this. If you want to double check that there is a contact in the Address book to match what you have typed in the To: line, you can click on the small icon on the bottom line that looks like a head with a check mark - this checks for valid contacts. The other way is to pick from the Address book directly - click on the address book icon beside 'Edit' on the bottom line menu.

If you are sending to more than one person, separate their names with a semi-colon eg. rod;peter;david -- in many desktop applications, you can use a comma to separate names but it won't work here - you must use a semi-colon.

Type a subject in the next field, just as you would in a regular email program. If you want to CC or BCC the message, click on the small double-down-arrow to the right of the Subject line. This expands the header to show you these fields.

Type your message as you would normally. Then click on the Send button. Do not click on the Ok button in the top right corner - this will not send your message and does not warn you of this. However the message does disappear which is a bit alarming, especially when you have just spent ages tapping out your message. Don't fret - it is simply stored in your Inbox (no, it's not logical but...) as a Draft message - open your Inbox and look for your message there - its envelope icon will be white, rather than the usual yellow, and it is usually at the top of your Inbox list (depending on how your Inbox display is sorted). Open your message again, and this time click on Send.

IMAP vs POP3

With an IMAP mail server, your mail generally stays on the server - this gives you greater protection against a crash and also means that you can access your mail from several different computers. But you must be connected to the server to read your mail. The University of Calgary mail servers only support IMAP. If in doubt about which kind of mail server you have, project participants can contact me for help on this.

Outlook vs Netscape mail

Netscape will also handle mail on either IMAP or POP3 servers. However, if you wish to use Netscape along with Pocket Inbox, then you will have to use an IMAP mail server. Using the Netscape mail client does not give you as much flexibility in handling your mail on your device and there is no record of Sent Mail. However, for those who are well used to the Netscape interface, you do not have to change to Outlook, just to use email on your device. The configuration of your Inbox in ActiveSync is a little bit more complicated - project participants can contact me for help on this.

Hotmail

Configuring your system to work with Hotmail and Pocket Inbox is a lot more challenging. It is possible but not at all straightforward - project participants can contact me for help on this.

ActiveSync vs. direct connection

As well as using ActiveSync for collecting email, you can also configure your Pocket Inbox to use a direct link, such as a modem or network connection. Not many users will want to take this approach but it is possible. For those who are interested, the configuration is done on the device, not in the ActiveSync dialog.

Open Pocket Inbox and then click on Services | New Service... and then complete the fields with the appropriate information, as given by your email provider...

You can leave the Windows NT domain blank in most cases...

In the return address field, enter the email address to which you want replies sent - this does not have to be the same as the system you are using at present. Complete the rest of the fields as needed until you can click the Finish button. Once you have done this, the service will appear as one of those available, at which point you simply have to select it and then click on Services | Connect.

This section does not deal with actually connecting your device to the email system by modem or network - that will be dealt with in another help page. Project participants can contact me for more help on this in the meantime.

Attachments

Pocket Inbox can also handle email attachments if you want. This is set up in ActiveSync during email configuration - see above. However, you should be aware that not all attachments will work well. MS Word and Excel files can be opened using Pocket Word and Pocket Excel. Other files can be saved and then be opened if you have the relevant software on your device to handle them. For example, image files, audio files, plain text, can all be handled directly. Most others need additional software...but there is a lot available.

Page last modified on October 31, 2005