Using a cellphone for email
Yesterday I set up my Gmail account with IMAP. I’d been using Gmail for sometime with POP3, but IMAP works better with slow connections as you can delete the crud before it is downloaded. My cellphone, a SonyEricsson W880i, supports IMAP and SMTP, so I thought I’d change the mail settings from my Dreamhost account to Gmail.
The W880i has a great email client. Firstly it support TLS and SSL, and secondly it allows arbitrary ports to be used. Gmail uses the standard IMAP4S port (993), but an odd SMTPS port (587 instead of 465). My old Nokia 6230 couldn’t manage the secure SMTP. I originally set the phone up to check email every 30min, but the phone prompted me to consider ‘push’ notification. The Dreamhost IMAP server didn’t cause the phone to do this, so I gave it a go and turned off the 30min polling. Wikipedia has more info on IMAP PUSH, but it is great for mobile apps. It looks like it can be used for sending emails too from the one connection.
What a blast! When a new email is received in the Gmail box my phone almost immediately beeps and lets me know it is there. A 3G data connection is held the whole time (might hurt battery life), but very little data is exchanged (as opposed to polling). I added the email inbox as a shortcut to the phone too to make it easier to check.
It has already proved itself when I received an email immediately on the phone that took another 80min to arrive in my work account!
