Wireless email dilemna - looking for advice

[peterac]

I am in the market for a Pocket PC. I had one of the original iPAQs that died a while back and I am ready to get back into the wolrld of PDAs.

Here's my dilemna:
I need to get wirless access to my company emails (not my personal POP3s). I am a field rep and many of my colleagues have Blackberrys that our IT dept has setup for them. These co-worker can receive their Lotus Notes emails on their Blackberries. I think the IT dept has a Blackberry server. Therefore, if I got a PPC I would not be able to get my emails in this manner. Also, I use a Verizon cell phone and I live in the NYC area. I will not give up the Verizon phone which has the best reception in this area.

I do not want to get a Blackberry because the functionality of a PPC is to powerful to give up. I have been told that there will be a "plug in" for PPCs that will allow the Blacberry RIM technology to be put on a PPC? I was told that there is litigation going on to allow this in the USA. Can anyone expound on this? Can anyone offer any advice?
My dream would be to have a PPC that I can receive my corporate Lotus Notes emails on.

Thanks,
Pete R.
New York

[Sven Johannsen]

I can give you some generic insight. Don't know anything about the RIM?PPC thing.

There is a Lotus Notes client for PPCs. Several in fact. The one that seems to be tauted and reviewed as the best is MNotes by CommonTime.
http://www.commontime.com/mnotes.aspx

It is not going to give you that push technology you get with a Blackberry, but you can pull mail, etc. at intervals automatically. It does require the IT guys to allow access to the Lotus server from the network/internet. They likely do that for laptop users already.

[jimski]

My firm uses Lotus Notes but most users can connect to Notes via POP3 (so we can check mail via Internet for home/hotels, etc.). I have used my PPC (with standard mail app) to check email wirelessly for several years. I currently have an issue where I cannot send an email wirelessly to someone outside of our domain, but that's due to some new spam blocking issues that IT is working through.

Our IT Department recently setup a Blackberry server and several people are now using them, but like you I cannt do without my PPC. You should check to see if IT has setup access to Notes from the Internet. I think they need to give you a Notes Internet password, but aside from that (and knowing your server address) it should work.