07-05-2004, 01:00 AM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Pocket Inbox - Does Anyone Really Use This For Email?
:really mad: I'm ready to throw my E200 out the nearest window. Here's the scenario: I took Thursday and Friday off for a little "work on the house and yard with my wife" vacation, so my email accounts have gotten very full. I was at a family gathering tonight, and with some downtime I checked my Pocket PC Thoughts email accounts - 72 new messages. Email triage time! One-handed email triage with a Smartphone is an awesome thing. When it works that is, and this is what my rant is about. :evil:
I opened up my email account on Pocket Inbox, Smartphone 2003 version, and did a SEND/RECIEVE. It took a while, but eventually all the messages were downloaded onto the phone. I went through all 72 of them, deleting spam, responding to a few, and deleting the messages I didn't need to act on. I then did another SEND/RECEIVE to process the changes. No new messages showed up, so I was done. The first problem is that I shouldn't have to do a SEND/RECEIVE to process the changes. When an email client makes a connection to an IMAP server, it stays connected as long as the TCP/IP connection is available. When you open Outlook and switch to an IMAP email account, is connects up to the server and downloads the messages - and it stays connected. If you move/mark a message for deletion, it's moved/marked for deletion immediately because it's connected. It doesn't disconnect until you shut down the software. That's the way email clients are supposed to work with IMAP.
So why am I so angry? Because when I sat down at my computer tonight and opened Outlook, all of the messages I had processed where downloaded from the server, fresh and marked as unread. That's right, it's like my email triage never happened! I wasted my time and have to re-do everything. I've seen this before with the Pocket PC email client, and the only way to avoid it happening there is to connect to the email account, do the email traige, do a send/recieve, then press the connect icon to disconnect. That usually works, but why should I have to resort to such voodoo to process my email? The problem that makes this scenario worse is that there is no CONNECT function on the Smartphone Inbox client - just a SEND/RECIEVE. It's like the Microsoft software developers don't know there's a difference between POP and IMAP.
The Smartphone client works perfectly my Exchange account, but for me it's highly problematic with IMAP accounts. Frankly, at the moment I'm livid that once again Microsoft has released software that works great with their software, but is completely dysfunctional with what the rest of the world is using. If you can't make an email client that can process email via IMAP, what's the point of saying it can do email? There's some serious room for improvement here, because right now the Smartphone Inbox application is at the rock bottom of functionality if it can't do something this simple.
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