Palm and Treo Hacks

Get Your Email on the Road

You are on the move and you don’t have your desktop machine with you. Are you going to let that get in the way of your email fix? Of course not; you have your Palm device with you.

Once you have connected to the Internet [Hack #34] , sending and receiving email is trivial if you are using a dedicated Internet service for your Palm device, such as a paired Bluetooth phone or cellular data service on a Treo.

Things get more interesting however, if you want more consistency between your desktop machine and your Palm device. Do you need to be able to search old emails? Do you want to sort email on the move and see those changes on your desktop? Will you be traveling to areas where you can’t always get an Internet connection on your Palm device? There are two solutions: web-based email and IMAP.

Web-based Email

One solution is to use a web-based email service. The popular services such as Yahoo and Gmail have one limitation: you have to use one of their email addresses (@yahoo.com or @gmail.com). If you have an existing email account that you want to use, you can’t use these services. Instead, you will need to use a web-based email aggregator. An email aggregator combines email from one or more POP accounts and presents it through a common web interface. You use a web browser [Hack #37] to access your email wherever you are. You will see the same interface, folders, and email from your desktop and Palm device. You can still use all of your existing accounts ...