.KEYWORD treomail
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Treo Mail delivers advanced mobile email
.TIP
.SUMMARY While Treo Communicators are great wireless devices, Bill Mann believes their email-handling abilities have lagged behind those of dedicated wireless email devices. However, in this review he’ll show you how Handspring’s Treo Mail service can turn your Treo Communicator into a wireless email powerhouse.
.AUTHOR Bill Mann
While Treo Communicators are superior wireless devices, their email-handling abilities have lagged behind those of dedicated wireless email devices like the RIM BlackBerry. But you can turn your Treo communicator into a wireless email powerhouse with the Treo Mail service (at http://www.handspring.com/services/treomail/).
With the Treo Mail service installed, your communicator can check your mail manually or automatically at an interval you specify. You can have the service notify you as soon as a new message is available. You can control which messages get delivered to your communicator by setting Treo Mail filters. In short, with Treo Mail, your communicator gains almost all the wireless email capabilities of a BlackBerry, along with all the other Treo advantages.
.H1 How does Treo Mail work?
Treo Mail comes in two varieties. Treo Mail Corporate Desktop Edition is for people who get their mail from a Microsoft Exchange email server (or even a POP3 server) behind a corporate firewall. Treo Mail Internet Edition is for people who use a POP3 email server connected to the Internet. That covers most home users, except for those folks who use AOL, Excite, Hotmail, Juno, or Netscape mail. I used the Internet Edition for this review, with Access-4-Free (they provide 10 free hours of connect time a month) providing the POP3 email service.
The key to understanding this product is the Treo Mail Service Operations Center. The Operations Center receives email from your PC (Corporate Desktop Edition) or POP3 email server (Internet Edition). The Operations Center’s servers store an encrypted copy of your email, delivering it to your communicator when requested. The Operations Center can also send SMS alerts to your Treo when it receives new email for you. You control the Treo Mail Service Operations Center through a set of secure Web pages provided by the service.
The Operations Center interacts with the Treo Mail Application on your communicator. The Treo Mail application is a standard email program, allowing you to send, receive and forward messages.
You control several aspects of the Treo Mail Service from the Treo Mail Application, including how frequently the service delivers email to your Communicator, and which types of email will be delivered.
The difference between the Internet Edition and Enterprise Desktop Edition is a result of the different ways Microsoft Exchange and POP3 email servers work. In the Internet Edition, the Treo Mail Service Operations Center gets your email directly from the POP3 email server. However, due to limitations in the POP3 standard, when you read or delete email on your Treo, there’s no way to mark that message as read on the POP3 server. This can be a bit confusing and requires you to do more work.
In the Enterprise Desktop Edition, the corporate firewall prevents the Operations Center from connecting directly to the Exchange server. Instead, the Treo Mail service installs the Treo Mail Desktop Assistant on your PC at work. The Desktop Assistant transfers your email to and from the Microsoft Exchange email server, as well as out through the firewall to the Operations Center. If the Desktop Assistant isn’t installed and running, the Operations Center can’t get at your email. This means that you must always leave your work PC on if you use the Enterprise Desktop Edition and want to receive your email.
The Enterprise Desktop Edition does have one big advantage over the Internet Edition. If you read or delete a message using the Treo Mail application on your communicator, the Treo Mail service can make the corresponding changes in Microsoft Exchange, saving you the confusion and hassles of having to make the same changes in two places.
.H1 Installing and using Treo Mail
Treo Mail isn’t hard to install, but you must follow the directions exactly. The Treo Mail service needs to know certain things about the email server it will connect to, and if you don’t enter that information correctly, the service won’t be able to deliver your email to your Treo. I tried to enter this information from memory and needed help from the Handspring technical support staff to get the mess sorted out, so make sure you have the information correct before you start installing Treo Mail.
I suggest that you make note of the exact name of the incoming email server that the service will connect to, as well as the logon name and password. You can usually find this information on your ISP’s support pages, or get it from your network administrator if you’re using the Corporate Desktop Edition.
Ever since I got Treo Mail installed properly, it has worked perfectly. My communicator automatically checks for messages using the interval I specified and sounds a nice jazz tune to alert me when new messages arrive. It even shows how many new ones there are.
I concluded that I don’t really need to know the instant a new message arrives in my Inbox, so I haven’t been using the SMS alerts. However, turning SMS alerts on or off takes only a few seconds, and it’s nice to know that the feature is there for those times when I’m expecting a really urgent message but can’t be by my PC waiting for it.
Choosing how frequently the Treo Mail Assistant should check for messages takes a bit of thought. If you don’t often get urgent messages and you want to conserve airtime minutes, you can set the Assistant to manual mode. If you really need to stay on top of your messages, you can have the Assistant check for messages as frequently as every 30 minutes and set up SMS alerts too.
I normally have the Treo Mail Assistant set to automatically check for messages every two hours during business hours. This is a nice compromise, allowing me to receive my messages fairly frequently throughout the day, without burning up all the airtime minutes on my mobile phone plan. But when I’m expecting an important message, I have it check every 30 minutes. It takes only seconds to make this change, making it simple to adapt the Assistant’s behavior to my needs.
In the time I’ve used Treo Mail, it has never hiccupped, dropped a message, hung up, or exhibited any kind of aberrant behavior at all. Treo Mail Internet Edition is solid.
.H1 Conclusion
The Treo Mail Service offers several benefits over One-Touch Mail, the email program installed on every Treo Communicator. However, Treo Mail requires a yearly subscription fee of $49 for the Internet Edition and $99 for the Enterprise Desktop Edition. If wireless email is an important part of the way you use your Treo Communicator, I strongly recommend you try Treo Mail for yourself. You can download either edition of the Treo Mail software from the Handspring Web site and get a free 30-day trial of the service.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Treo Mail, visit http://www.handspring.com/services/treomail/.
For a download of the 30-day trial of either version of Treo Mail, visit http://www.handspring.com/services/treomail/try_it.jhtml.
For more information on One-Touch Mail, visit http://www.jpmobile.com/one_touch_mail.asp.
For more information on Handspring’s Treo Communicators family, visit http://www.handspring.com/products/communicators/index.jhtml.
For more information on Access-4-Free, visit http://www.access-4-free.com.
For more information on Palm handhelds, visit http://www.palm.com.
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.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO Bill Mann is author of "How to Do Everything with Your Tablet PC." Visit his site at http://www.techforyou.com.
