oh the woes of having a Windows Mobile smartphone and trying to get it to work with my IMAP email server on TextDrive…

The story begins with a smartphone, and then a server change. I changed mobile phone networks so that I could get my hands on a cheap smartphone, the Softbank X01HT aka HTC Hermes. Only to find out later that half a dozen features were disabled by Softbank. Nevermind, the main features I wanted the phone for were the slide-out keyboard and IMAP email access. I haven’t found a mobile phone in Japan that has predictive English input while keeping Japanese input so that’s why I wanted the slide-out keyboard.

Well the built-in email client (Pocket Outlook) doesn’t support IMAP IDLE which means I don’t get notified of new mail automatically, which is pretty important for a mobile. I had to set-up a check every x minutes which drained the battery.

Worse was to come when I switched email servers (from Dreamhost to Textdrive), I found that Pocket Outlook has a compatibility problem with the server set-up and won’t sync and hold the message list of the Inbox. After the first check, it just clears the list. Again, no good for a mobile.

After weeks of frustrations and checking out various possible solutions from different email clients (qmail, vgsmail and a few others), I decided to hack my system something stupid to get it to work in a half functioning way.

Pocket Outlook will sync sub-folders ok, so I set one up and using a short procmail filter, moved all mail to the sub-folder.
:0:
.SubInbox/

Unfortunately I don’t get a new mail notification this way so I extended and modified the set of filters to cc a copy of any received messages to a free fastmail.fm account.
:0 c:
.SubInbox/

:0
! something@fastmail.fm

Pocket Outlook doesn’t have any problems with fastmail.fm’s servers. Then set-up a check every x minutes on that fastmail.fm account. If I need to reply to any messages, I don’t do so from the fastmail account, instead I go to the real account’s subfolder and reply from there otherwise I have trouble from some white-listing based spam blocks.

Not elegant, still drains the battery but it half-works and until a half-decent email client for Windows Mobile/Pocket PC comes out it will have to do. The one bright spot is because of MNP and my mobile email being totally IMAP based, when a suitable replacement (no, not the iPhone) comes out I will be able to switch seamlessly.

Notes:

  • qmail is incompatible with Courier-IMAP
  • vgsmail is unstable
  • Flexmail 2007 doesn’t support Japanese encodings
  • I could have forwarded to a Joyent account but the reason I didn’t escapes me at this moment