Hello All,

I asked this question in a general forum, but I am asking it again here. I am hoping that someone can help me out.

My first issue is with email. The PDA syncs with my Outlook Email. That is fine and dandy.... if I am at my computer. But there is NO way to check those same accounts, and keep it all synced! Or am I wrong? In my single Outlook profile, on the PC, I have 3 accounts. My ISP, my business website, and my Gmail. All 3 accounts to one single inbox; it works great. But I can't do that on the PDA. I have to create the 3 separate accounts. Furthermore, HOW am I supposed to keep all of that synced up with my Outlook mail??? When you create an account on the PDA, how can you sync a created account with your Outlook inbox? Is there a setting I am not finding? As far as I am seeing, the only thing that will sync is the "Outlook E-Mail" account?

So, let's say I set up my ISP email account on the PDA. If I am on my college campus (which is completely wireless), and I am connected to my ISP email account, and download some messages as well as reply to messages, there is no way to sync those sent messages up with the main Outlook account, is there? Am I missing something here? I can choose to not delete messages (and therefore leave them on the server), so that when I get home I can do a Send/Receive and download the new msgs on my PC. But I am not seeing a possible way to sync up the sent messages. Am I missing something? From the PDA, why is the Send/Receive and Connect buttons greyed out in the main Outlook account? If you create an account on the PDA, how do you sync it with Outlook on your PC? As far as I see, this cannot be done.

The second problem is with my contacts. Is there any way to get the PDA to sync with contacts other than those that are within the Contacts folder? I don't actually use this folder. I have about 6 subfolders created that I use to organize all of my contacts! What am I supposed to do? Just dump all of them in to the Contacts folder? My quick fix was to assign all the contacts a category (whose name matches the folder it is in), dump them all in the Contacts folder, and that way at least I can sort them by category on the PDA. Is there a better way?

Thank you very much in advance for your help!


- Vince

Has anyone run in to these issues?

Your first issue....it's difficult. As far as I can see, mobile emailing is one area where the whole Palmtop/Handheld thing let's us down a bit. It promises so much but doesn't YET deliver.

Firstly, sync'ing with Outlook is, in my own opinion, useless. It doesn't sync anything other than Inbox (so all my filtered incoming email would - if I used Outlook - not get sync'd, leaving only the unfiltered spam and trash to get sync'd) and it also doesn't (on my setup - others have more success) sync the sent items.

Also - when i want to reply to something I generally want it to go *now* and not have to wait what might be ten hours before I get back to the desktop to sync and send via Outlook. And if I do have to wait till then then I'd rather wait and use the keyboard anyway.

At the moment i overcome these issues in the following way:

I have a POP3 mail account for my domain. I also have a free dial-up POP3 account (with FreeUK). I have the domain POP3 account set up on the Axim and have it set to NOT delete email from the server. This way I can make sure I can read email at home and on the Axim. When I SEND an email from the Axim, I always BCC it to the FreeUK email address. This is only checked and downloaded on the desktop. This way I do get a copy of my reply sent to my desktop PC. It works but it's a bit messy.

The other option, and one that I've not had the time to get working right, is to see if your ISP offers IMAP email. Using IMAP, the email itself is stored on the ISP servers and you read/reply etc directly on there (or at least sync to the servers folders). Using this method, marking an email as read on the desktop will automatically mark it as read on the handheld when you next sync with the IMAP servers. Similarly, sending an email from the Axim will show in the sent items on both the desktop and the handheld.

You can use this method to cross platforms - you may have a dual boot Windows/Linux PC and a handheld and a smartphone and they can all access the same IMAP mail server and all see the same things. It works, and I am told, works well. However some ISP's have compatibility problems with some email clients using IMAP I find.

Your second query - Contact. Again, another failing in the Microsoft camp, in that Activesync doesn't sync sub-folders in Contacts. The only way around it is to move all your contacts to the main Contacts folder and then put them into categories. You can set Activesync to only sync certain categories (so acheiving the same as sub-folders) and you can set Outlook to only show certain categories in certain views/filters.

It looks messy but it does actually work better than folders as I have many contacts who cross over into two or three categories and that would be hard to do with folders.

I hope that this heps you out a bit!

Great post - just to add though, there is quite a bit of customization that can be done with the contacts view to make it a little prettier and easy to use. I have each catergory in a collapsable grouping and then sorted by company within each group. With each contact able to be a member of multiple groups I find it very simple to use. Admittedly I have no more than 250 contacts, I know some people have 500, 1,000 etc. But IMHO it's a great approach.

In addition, once those are synchronized to the PPC, by pressing the contacts button again and again you can cycle through the displayed category.

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

   

The IMAP concept sounds really promising! I will have to contact my ISP and look in to that. I have also considered setting up an Outlook Server... but I'm not entirely sure if that would even work.

The contacts ideas sound really good. I will have to implement that solution. I was really dissapointed as to how syncing email/contacts worked. It really doesn't work that well at all!

Here is a kind of off topic question... but when Mobile 2005 arrives, will we be able to purchase and install it on our PDAs? Or are OS upgrades something that only Dell can do?

-IF- Dell chooses to offer a WM2005 upgrade then based on past history you'll get it on CD and upgrade it yourself.

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

   

Well I just contacted my ISP, and they don't offer IMAP. So I'm not really sure what to do... my biggest problem is that sent emails are not stored or synced with the PC. I am one of those people that archives everything and never really permanantly deletes a thing.

IMAP - true, not all ISP's offer IMAP mailboxes. Also - does your email go through your ISP's mail servers? It's always a good idea to register your own domain name and use that for email and use the servers provided by whoever is hosting the domain. My ISP is Zen but my domains are with 1&1. It means that if I want to change ISP at any time then none of my email addresses change. Zen themselves don't (as far as I know) offer IMAP maiilboxes, but 1&1, my web/domain hosts, do offer it.

Setting up your own Outlook Server? I assume you mean an Exchange Server? Costly - very costly for one person, though there are services out there offering an account on a shared Exchange Server - do a search for shared exchange services of ssome such.

Upgrade the OS....in the past, mobile operating system updates have had to come from the manufacturer as they are all specific to the model (the screen drivers for instance are different on a Dell X50v than on a Looz 720 or something). So if there was an upgrade it was up to the manufacturer to decide whether it was worth offering it to existing devices and whether to charge for it or not.

However - I *did* read somewhere that the next Windows Mobile *may* be much more device independent and *may* not required updates from specific manufacturers, but I'd take that with a large dose of salt.

Might be worth looking into Gmail then. They currently give you over 2GB of mail storage to encourage you to keep everything and that storage is growing all the time.

You can set it up for POP/SMTP access from your PC and also from your handheld and you can set it so that emails received via POP remain on Gmail as well, so I assume they'd appear on both devices.

Emails sent from the PPC (I just checked it using WebIS Mail) appear in the PPC sent items AND in Gmail sent items, though they probably won't appear in the dektop sent items. But at least they will be there on the Gmail server!

It's not IMAP but it's a half-way house I guess. Other option is to, like I said before, buy a seperate domain/email package that offers IMAP and use that.

There is a way to make sure your sent items get synced as well. What you do is set up another folder called "sent" or whatever you want to call it. Set up a rule filter in Outlook (on the desktop) so that all your sent mail gets sent to this "sent" folder instead of "sent items". Then go to Activesync, tools, options, inbox, settings, and make sure that the "sent" folder ( the one you've created) is ticked, then...it will all sync. This however, will not work with drafts or anything else...but at least you have the sent and inbox folders now!

You could manually move things into a separate drafts folder and sent that if you can really be bothered...