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Free Outlook Push email

This may be old news to some but new news to others.
As you may know your WM5 and WM6 device can do a wireless sync with Exchange and offers blackberry style 'push' email.
To do this you need a configured Exchange server and for most this can be expensive or impossible to do yourself.
But there is hope, and its free.
www.mail2web.com offers FREE hosted exchange email. The only thing is you get a little add banner along the top but apart from that its corporate style exchange for free. Whats more it comes with OWA enabled also free of charge.
You can even set it to pull email from other POP3 email accounts.
You can access your mail via the web or POP3/IMAP4 clients.
For around 80p a month you can upgrade to their Plus service, this allows you to have the outgoing FROM: address to be your own. For me I use it to send mail from my personal domain.
So the upgrade is well worth it given the other extra features you get.
But take a look at the free service. I first switched a while ago as ntlworld.com has really crap webmail. So got a free account and just forwarded it all to mail2web.com for full outlook wonder.
I think this is a useful tip as I couldnt find anyone else offering free push enabed services.

alternative
Since this service is goint to cost next month, does anyone have a alternative?
I tried windows live, but it doesnt push emails instantly nor does ita have calender and contacts synchronisation :/

I've been trying to find a good new solution as well.
I'm currently trying out emoze, which is an app that allows you to configure push email (with certain service providers). It WORKS, but it doesn't allow full folder sync with gmail, so it's not quite as useful as true push from my IMAP gmail account would be.

seven is another.
I tried mail2web and was unimpressed though all our domains are there now. It wouldn't push html email.
I'd search out a provider that offers IMAP idle but Flexmail is the only app on the WM side to support it.

Funambol Push Email

Anyone with any experience using Funambol? It's an open source push email solution. It seems to be the only Exchange competitor open source has to offer. I'm installing it now to my server so I'll post my experience. Any thing I should watch out for during the install?
Thanks

LMAO lack of interest apparently!

I tried myfunambol today... Setting up an account and installing everything was easy. Seemed to sync my contacts, calendar and tasks just fine... but I couldn't use more than one email account which was a bummer. But more importantly... the one email account I did use.. gmail... Would push the email to my device after about 5-10 minutes. It would notify me that there was new mail... but when I would go to the Funambol account (won't let you rename it in pocket outlook from what I could tell) it would say Sending/Recieving... and after it was done... there was nothing in my inbox. It did manage to get them after I clicked on Menu > Send/Recieve... but it was still spotty. I didn't get that "reliable" feeling from it.
I tried it for about an hour and even synced my Outlook on my desktop. The syncing of contacts and what not seemed fine... but the email didn't seem to work for me.
I'm on the 8525 btw.
I decided to just go back to mail2web for now... and just forward my work and my personal email to one email account. BAH!
I wish pocket Outlook would just support IMAP idle for gmail already... that and PPC PimBackup is all I would need.
Mark

funambol does actually support instant push, and as soon as the server sees new mail, your phone will sync it.
Your problem is that if you're using the my.funambol free hosted service, their server is only polling your email every 15 min.
Basically, you're notified as soon as the server has new mail for you, however the server only checks for you on 15 min intervals.
Why?
Because the public email servers (yahoo, gmail, aol, etc) dont like get pounded with constant email checking. I was told even blackberry servers check public servers on intervals for this reason (private domains will be instant tho).
If you have an ISP or private domain email, and you're nice to funambol's support team, you can ask them to set your account to check more often. I don't know if they'll do this for everyone, but they set mine to check every 1 min. Now the longest I have to wait for email to arrive is one minute, the actual time averages around 10 sec.
Or you can set up your own funambol server if you'd like...

Ah, that explains the delay.
I was hoping the Funambol server would implement IMAP IDLE connection to gmail so that the emails would be pushed much faster than a 15 minute polling. I'll have to do some more research.

Dishe,
You seem very knowledgeable about Funambol. Do you know if it support HTML email with the Windows Mobile plug-in? It is currently giving me plain-text, I thought maybe there was a setting I could do to change this. Thanks.

www.nuevasync.com
No joke, 1000x better than any other sync solution. Only works with Gapps, but I bet that's what 90% of you guys are looking for anyway.

TerryMathews said:
www.nuevasync.com
No joke, 1000x better than any other sync solution. Only works with Gapps, but I bet that's what 90% of you guys are looking for anyway.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
From their website, it does not seem to support push email (YET).

I checked out Nuevasync and it is awesome! It syncs contacts and calendar perfectly and doesn't require any software downloads. It uses activesync. Thanks a lot for the tip!

is really useful for me, I am glad to read it here.

Best email, contact & calendar provider online for PocketPC users ?

Hello,
I am a PocketPC user, and I want to completely reorganize the way I am using my private emails, contact & calendar !
I would like to manipulate my data (email, contact & calendar), on the PocketPC AND online on the Web.
Which solution email/contact/calendar solution do you recommend me ?
I have listed these solutions (do you know other possibilities ?):
- Google and Zoho PIM suite: The good, it is online and free. The bad is that there is no way to sync them with the PocketPC.
- Microsoft Exchange: The good, it is on the Pocket PC. The bad, it is costs money.
chris

I use Yahoo. Sync device with Outlook; Outlook and device always the same. Outlook syncs with Yahoo contacts, calendar, etc via Intellisync. So I have a nice backup of everything on Yahoo, can still access things on Yahoo mobile or Yahoo full web.
Outlook on Desktop.
pOutlook on Device.
Yahoo Intellisync to sync Yahoo and Outlook.
Sync Device to Outlook, Outlook to Yahoo.
However this takes mental energy to remember which will be the home to the 'correct' info. So if you edit things in Yahoo, on your phone and in Outlook without first syncing everythign, you can run into issues.
I recently moved to a Service Desk software for my business. It is a served application and I just go to the WWW address to get all the info. Interent dependent though...and web browsing is slow when under the gun...

I also know that if you use the Yahoo mobile plugin system that you pretty much just work from within that shell. Its good for some. I guess it is called Y! Go. I had it on my 8125 and it worked well, a bit slow on the 8125.

I didn't know about this Yahoo sync system. I will have a look at it.
If I understand your feedback, what you are missing is: the need to sync your contacts/calendar directly online from your PocketPC. That's right ?
I do agree with you, the best solution would be to be able to sync online all your applications, that ís the application on the PocketPC (POutlook) and the application on the PC (Outlook).
As far as I know, only Microsoft Exchange is offering this possibility. But it costs quite a lot..
Chris

Google Apps and mail2web
I really like googlemail, and actually use google apps for domains to manage a couple of domain names. I've set up Outlook using IMAP to connect to these accounts but do not schedule mail download. This allows me to easily send emails from my account.
I've then set up mail forwarding within googlemail to a free mail2web account, that is in effect Exchange. This is set up as a push account within Outlook(works really well). Within googlemail I have a rule setup to archive mails once they are forwarded, this gives me a clean inbox should I wish to bring up the IMAP connection to view archived mail.

Could anyone using MS Exchange, give a feedback about this solution ?
Nick, why don't you just use your MS Exchange account (mail2web) ? it seems to me that you don't need to have a gmail account.
Chris

With Mail2web I can only reply and send mails as [email protected]
If I want to send an email from my own domain I need to do it through my Google Apps for Domains setup.
If mail2web could handle personal domains it would be fine. Google do a really good job of this with regard to MX records and reverse dns lookups.

Hosted Exchange would be a nice solution: admitted it costs a few euros per month (6 here) but you get a mailbox which WinMo directly syncs with (without any dirty hacks, plugins and stuff) plus a quite nice webmail/calendaring/collaboration environment (Outlook Web Access).

According to your post, it seems that MS Exchange is actually the only "clean" (=acceptable) way to have the possibility to have your email/contact/calendar on your PocketPC and online.
So, I definitely need to have a look at the offers to see how much it is. Do you know a comparison table of the different companies offering Exchange hosting ?
Nick, i understand now why you still use Google. I do think you can use your own domain with Exchange thought. Maybe not with mail2web.com , but other competitors probably offer this.
How much do you pay for your hosted Exchange ?
spone1, I agree with your conclusion. Which Exchange hosting provider do you use ?
Chris

Mail2web is free!! You may as well sign-up just to see how Push/Active Sync works.
So 95% of the benefits of Exchange (active sync, Outlook Web access etc.) but just no domain hosting. I don't have that many mails that I need to reply to from my domain when I am out and about, so it's really not that big a deal for me to quickly switch accounts when I need to. I'm sure I could get hosted Exchange including a domain or two, but I'd expect it would be between £50 and £100 pounds a year, and wouldn't really give me that much benefit.
But the benefit of having push email is great. ActiveSync does seem to occassional have trouble connecting if my connection type changes through the day. Eg, I connect via WIFI at home, then in the car the phone will pick up 3G, thn by the time I'm at work I'm down to GPRS, at some locations in work I can pick up WIFI again and then for the return journey etc. It can be fixed be manually synchronising to get things running again, but that does kind of defeats the object of push email.
Another alternative is to run your own mail server. It doesn't have to be MS Exchange, there are other that are compatible. But this seems a little like too much hard work without much benefit.

Don't forget that you can use Google with any domain by using Google Apps.
They currently handle MX records for my Domain.

Yeah, Google apps is great, and would be perfect for me if it could handle push email. IMAP isn't the end of the World, just not as slick.
Google apps is my primary mail handler. In effect all mail2web is doing for me is adding push capability

Cloud winmo now
I have a setup that works great for me.
I use a beta (free) service mobipush for push gmail. http://www.mobipush.com/
I use remember the milk for tasks that can be a plugin in google calendar and sync wirelessly with your outlook mobile tasks.
https://www.rememberthemilk.com/
(there is a gadget to add RTM to your gmail screen and intergrated into google calendar.)
I use ogg sync for syncing contacts and calendar.
http://oggsync.com/
Something extra!!!
I also us Jott to add via voice tasks and calendar events to remember the milk and google calendar when I can't type. i.e. when driving.
http://jott.com
This system gives me the cloud experiance of a google phone with the power of a winmo device

I used 4smartphone.net hosted Exchange and before that I'd been using Intellisync for over-the-air sync with Lotus Domino. Intellisync solution was a good one as it provided rather comprehensive sync options. However, I'd been using it few years ago, so I don't really know whether this solution is still available (looks like Nokia had bought Intellisync).
Exchange solution is great for its native support, but lacks few features (like separate folders support and OTA sync for notes).
I think that hosted Exchange 2007 is the preferred option.

Nick-- said:
With Mail2web I can only reply and send mails as [email protected]
If I want to send an email from my own domain I need to do it through my Google Apps for Domains setup.
If mail2web could handle personal domains it would be fine. Google do a really good job of this with regard to MX records and reverse dns lookups.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have my personal domain stuza.com pointing to my mail2web.com account and I love it. Works superbly. I can edit calender/contacts and it changes automaticaly on the mail2web server. Also saves a bucketload of time should you decide to flash your phone - you simply give it your email address and it goes away and autoconfigures the exchange settings and then pulls all your contacts/schedule data down. All my mail comes into [email protected] and goes out from [email protected] .... frickin sweet.
I will never live again without an exchange solution.
edit: dont know if it makes a diference but i have a paid mail2web account

Has anybody tried funambol.com? It is an open source project that I recently found. I haven't tested it with the exception of email but it does have contacts and calendar components. I hope it works for you!
gottago
Sprint Touch w/ WM 6.1

windows live mail
windows live mail works just like exchange, syncing calendar, mail, contacts...etc
Push mail works easily and without any setup. Usually it comes with wm6 phones, but you can also install the cab found on the forum.

Xilicon said:
windows live mail works just like exchange, syncing calendar, mail, contacts...etc
Push mail works easily and without any setup. Usually it comes with wm6 phones, but you can also install the cab found on the forum.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Okay my age is probably getting in the way, but don't you have to use Outlook to synch calendar? Has there been an upgrade to Windows Live Mail or something else I may be missing?
gottago
Sprint Touch w/ WM 6.1

gottago said:
Has anybody tried funambol.com? It is an open source project that I recently found. I haven't tested it with the exception of email but it does have contacts and calendar components. I hope it works for you!
gottago
Sprint Touch w/ WM 6.1
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Further on funambol.com and to the original poster's request. Funambol has it's own web site that will serve to pull/push email and contacts with GMail. I don't use the calendar on Gmail so I can not address that but Funambol provides you a myfunambol web page that will consolidate your email/contacts as well as any calendar/tasks/notes/briefcase on your PPC. So, in effect, you can go to your myfunambol page and see your email, contacts, calendar, etc. all in one place on the web as well as on your PPC. Funambol provides flexibility as to what it actually synchs so you remain in control. While you can schedule your synch times, it also has the option of synching on a 'push' basis. I will admit that this capability is not necessarily perfect at this point but it is clearly being worked on.
This is a great solution for me as I do not use Outlook (too cheap to buy) or Internet Explorer on my PC. I use Thunderbird/Lightning and Firefox. There is a Funambol plugin for Thunderbird that works well.
NOTE: I have no affiliation with Funambol other than as a user of this one product.
gottago
Sprint Touch w/WM 6.1

Hotmail sync?

I tried the MyTouch 3G last year and found that it's email sync with Hotmail was poor. If you deleted/read something from the device, it would not delete it/mark it read on the server. I tried the K-9 program, but it was pretty lame as it did not fix the above issues.
Has this been fixed? I really enjoyed all other aspects of Android, but this issue is a necessity for a phone for me.
Also, the native MS exchange server support only covered email. Have they added contacts and calendar syncing? When I had the MyTouch 3G, I bought the program "Touchdown" and that worked slick.
I am just curious to see if the Android people had advanced into the core MS functionality yet.
Thanks for any input.

POP is notoriously hard to keep in sync among multiple clients. There's usually a 'mark as read on download' setting that works ok if you only have one POP client downloading mail. When I last checked Hotmail didn't have that ability but maybe they've done some improvements. If they have an IMAP or ActiveSync option that would be the ideal solution.
In my case I don't use my Hotmail as my primary account but I still have email that goes to it. I use Gmail's ability to sync with external POP accounts to download and label my Hotmail email. This way I get my Hotmail email pushed to me like my Gmail email and I don't have to use separate email clients to read them. I also prefer Gmail's web interface and spam filter so I don't even bother going to Hotmail's site any more. The problem with this approach is that Android's Gmail app doesn't allow you to change the 'from' field so if you reply to a Hotmail email it will be from your Gmail address. This isn't an issue for me since I essentially use my Hotmail as a read-only account. If you have a similar use case then this method would probably work well for you.

Thanks for the input. It sounds like things are about the same as what I was experiencing.

Email removed after PC download.

Hey guys,
I'm on Windows phone temporarily while my HTC OneX is being fixed.
I'm having a frustrating problem with my email on a Nokia Lumia 610.
Using a POP account the windows phone downloads my emails without any problems. But, once I download the same emails on my PC, the windows Phone decides to remove(from the phone) the same emails rather than leaving copies like both Ios & Android. This is highly frustrating when forwarding Airline tickets or schedules you want to save for later reference. Today I missed a bus because of it. Thanks Microsoft
Anyone know how to fix it? The email settings seemed too dumbed down to be of any use.
Cheers.

First suggestion would be to use an email protocol that is merely old, instead of completely obsolete. POP3 is from the 80s, and it shows. Does your provider seriously not offer IMAP access? There are plenty of perfectly good and free emails providers which do... Some of them will even pull email from other inboxes for you.
Second suggestion, if you absolutely must use POP3, would be to make sure that both the phone and PC are configured to "Leave a copy of messages on the server" when downloading. My best guess as to what's happening is that your PC is configured to download and remove the messages from the server. Then, when your phone syncs with the server again, it sees that the messages it had previously downloaded were deleted from the server, so it deletes the local copies as well.

That's exactly what is happing. I just think its the wrong way. Even my old Nokia dumbphone from 5 years ago left copies of downloaded emails on the phone. As does the Iphone & Android.
Thanks for the help anyway. I don't think Imap is an option.

Gmail, as one example, supports IMAP (for free) and I believe it can retrieve mail from a POP3 server for you too (although I haven't tried). Alternatively, you may be able to set up your POP3 account to forward mail to a Gmail account. IMAP really is just a superior protocol.
Is there some reason you're not keeping the messages on the server after download? I guess I can see why you'd prefer that the phone not remove messages that were removed from the server, but given how little synchronization is possible in POP3 anyhow, I actually think that behavior is better than nothing (although perhaps it should be configurable and for some reason isn't).

I was able to switch to IMAP, but my WP is still deleting the mails after the PC downloads them. UGH.
If I let my PC email client leave the messages on the server, it will constantly re download them. (I think).
I'm sure this is a WP problem/oversight as multiple other devices work correctly.

If your PC email client constantly re-downloads message that it itself has chosen to leave on the server, you're using a truly outrageously bad email client! Even with POP3, it's quite possible for a client to list the messages on the server, and then only download the ones it doens't have. This is how all major email clients work (Outlook, Windows [Live] Mail, Thunderbird, Apple's Mail app, the WP7 email client, etc.) Even better, though, would be to also use IMAP on the PC client, as that way you could truly keep things in sync between the phone and the PC (for example, if you read a message on the phone, it would be makred as read on the PC when you got home, and if you send a message on the PC at home, it would be visible in the Sent Items folder on the phone too).