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View Full Version : Mailer clients & attachments: multiple selection/saving; Outlook attachment problems


Menneisyys
09-08-2006, 12:38 PM
I’ve been asked (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=569&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) (see the comments section at the bottom) two strictly mail attachment-related questions lately:

can you mass-select/save mail attachments from any Pocket PC mailer client?
can you see attachments sent from the desktop Outlook operating in HTML mode?


As this information is missing from my well-known Mailer Roundup (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=569&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1) (the definitive source of everything Pocket PC mailing-related), I’ve decided to devote some time to it to find out how the Pocket PC mailer applications behave in this respect.

Note that I’ve tested the latest versions (FlexMail 2007 was released some 10 days ago (08/30), nPop 1.08 (http://www.npopsupport.fsworld.co.uk/npop108uk4_arm.zip) (see download page (http://www.npopsupport.fsworld.co.uk/downloads.htm)) about a month ago (08/14) and ProfiMail 2.55 some 3 days ago (09/06); of course, I’m using the latest nightly build of QMail) of all the tested applications.

First, the first question is easier to answer: you can not mass-select in Messaging, but you can do this in two other clients: FlexMail 2007 and Qmail.

The answer to the second question is a bit more complicated. First, if you only have access to a Pocket PC, the only way to retrieve attachments from Outlook (the infamous “winmail.dat” problem) mails is using FlexMail 2007. It’s the only Pocket PC mailer client to have support for parsing winmail.dat for attachments (but NOT for rendering information! All it can do is finding the attachments in winmail.dat). If you use other clients, you’ll need to, for example, upload winmail.dat to your desktop computer, decode it there and then send it back to your Pocket PC.

Incidentally, if you want to know how such a file is sent out by Outlook, take a look at this shot (http://www.winmobiletech.com/092006MailAttachmentProbs/WinMailAttachMail.png). As can be seen, there are only two E-mail parts: a simple text one and winmail.dat itself. That is, Outlook doesn’t include these attachments right to the mail itself (then, any attachment-capable mailer would be able to access these) but inside winmail.dat. This is why no Pocket PC-based mailer clients are able to see these attachments (except for FlexMail). This is a major mistake of the Outlook engineers (unless they wanted to lock their users into Outlook), which could easily have been avoided by simply adding the attachments in a mail-conform way.

The comparison chart (also see the screenshots!) is HERE (http://www.winmobiletech.com/092006MailAttachmentProbs/table.html) (click the link!)