See the bottom-most, new section(s) of my yesterday’s article.

I, being the author of the Windows Mobile Mailer Bible, probably the best source of everything mailing-related, always receive several mailing-related questions. One of the most often asked one concerns mass selection operations to be able to quickly delete or mark (un)read several (or all) messages. The main reason for this is, for example, resetting the “new / unread mail” counter on your main home (on Pocket PC’s, “Today”) screen by quickly deleting or making read mail you know you won’t ever need – without the need to open and/or delete them one by one.

First, let’s take a look at how this is to be done in the two major flavors of Windows Mobile:

1.1 Pocket PC (WM6 Professional / Classic; devices with touch screens)

It’s very easy to mass-select your mails in Pocket PC’s. All you need to do is either:

1. mass-select the mails you want to mark / delete with the stylus and/or
2. if you have a built-in thumbboard, press Shift and the up/down arrow keys (its effect is the same as that of the stylus when mass selecting messages) and/or
3. if you want to mass-select all messages (not just some of them), bring up the on-screen keyboard and press Ctl and, then, A

After this, all mass operations will work as supposed to.

1.2 MS Smartphone (WM6 Standard; devices without touch screens)

Unfortunately, the touchscreen-less MS Smartphone platform works in a pretty much different way. First, let’s start with the built-in messaging:

1.2.1 Messaging

As with the “big brother”, the Pocket PC, there aren’t any menu-based mass selection capabilities built-in in the MS Smartphone version of Messaging either. This can be seen in the following menu shot:

As there’s no touch screen and/or on-screen keyboards either, you couldn’t use Ctrl-A without third party tools (more on them later).

1.2.1.1 A quick tip for easier one-by-one deletion

If you want to quickly delete messages (with a single press of the left softkey – warning, the left softkey is only assigned the “Delete” functionality in WM6 and above, NOT in WM5!), do the following: go to Tools / Options / Other / uncheck Warn when deleting messages in the message list:

This makes it far easier to delete mails. This, however, doesn’t help in making a mail read. The latter will always require two button presses per mail (as opposed to – again, only under WM6+ - one, when you delete mail) (Menu / Mark as read).

1.2.2 FlexMail

With the alternative, excellent mailer client, FlexMail, the situation is better as of the current version (FlexMail 4 beta; 03/11/2008).

1.2.2.1 (Un)read flag toggling

In the top-level Folder view, if you just press Action on the folder, you can quickly toggle the read flag of all mail inside:

You can also do the same in the folder itself (Menu / Mark):

(Note that this Bible does NOT discuss Java applets or applications. For more info on running applets under Windows Mobile, see the Web Browsing Bible; for application-related info, see my generic Java articles.)

You may have already heard at least of Java games (more precisely, MIDlets) running on almost all current “dumb” phones. These games are all the rage today, especially with teenagers, which also means there are thousands of sometimes really high-quality games for ordinary phones, all written using the portable Java language, ready to be played on (almost) any kind of mobile phone. Just an example: in THIS HowardForums thread, the topic starter post lists some (but not all!) games available for the Samsung QVGA 240x320 phones (d600, d900, e900 etc – not only Windows Mobile ones!). Quite an impressive list, isn’t it? And it’s just the tip of the iceberg – there are a lot more games, all waiting for you to purchase, download and run!

No, don’t think MIDlets are only for gamers and are absolutely useless otherwise. You can make a good use of them in the enterprise too. There are several solutions already for, for example, mobile payment, reservations etc. done using a MIDlet as opposed to the Web, which is, in a lot of cases, is much harder to access / operate on a small-screen device. Controlling for example your bank transfers via SMS can also be less intuitive and/or require a lot more work / data entry than using a GUI to do this. Other, known enterprise-related MIDlets are Jupiter, which is basically a financial data streaming program (also see THIS) and Betfair (also see THIS). Should you be interested in these “MIDlets in the Enterprise” questions, I really recommend Michael Juntao Yuan’s excellent book “Enterprise J2ME: Developing Mobile Java Applications” – I’ve learnt a LOT from it. Highly recommended!

http://www.smartphonemag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=1247&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

UPDATE (11/10/2007): make sure you check out THIS.
(end of update)

In my well-known, highly recommended (do read it if you haven't already done so!) Mailer Roundup and Secrets of being notified of new, incoming E-mail messages on the Pocket PC, I haven’t devoted much space to IMAP4 compliance testing. In this article, I elaborate strictly (read the above-linked roundups for further, non-IMAP-specific information on these applications) on this subject and test all the IMAP4-compliant Pocket PC-based mailer clients: the built-in Messaging (along with the vgsmail add-on), FlexMail 2007, Qmail, IBE Mail and ProfiMail.

IMAP4 (I’ll also refer to it as “IMAP”) is a widely supported, highly recommended way of accessing mail. You may really want to give it a try if you have a capable client because it is much-much more advanced than POP3, the other remote alternative (and you don't have Exchange). It offers a lot of goodies: for example, on-server folders, “push mail” with IDLE, on-server mailbox folders, Sent/Draft synchronization (upload) to the server etc. For example, I recommend the following articles: What is IMAP and what are its specific advantages over POP3?, The difference between POP and IMAP, What are IMAP and POP?, Advantages of Imap over POP, The IMAP advantage, Message Access Paradigms and Protocols, IMAP vs. POP3, IMAP for POP Users etc. Please do check out at least some of these articles - here, I don't explain why for example remote folders are great to have. The linked articles do this job very well.

Note that, as with all my roundups, this also contains dozens of mini-tutorials of how a given mailer client can be configured to do a given task. That is, even if you’re a seasoned IMAP user, you will definitely want to read the article and, particularly, check out the screenshots and remarks in the comparison chart thoroughly – you will be delighted to see how many tips and never-before-published tricks this article contains!

I’ve been asked (see the comments section at the bottom) two strictly mail attachment-related questions lately:

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

As this information is missing from my well-known Mailer Roundup (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.

http://www.webis.net/products_info.php?p_id=mail&tab_id=download

For a long time, I’ve thought there is no way of relocating ActiveSync-synchronized Outlook mail (that is, mail that ActiveSync synchronizes from/with your desktop Outlook; not to be confused with mail you download straight from your POP3/IMAP mailboxes on your PDA without any ActiveSync synchronization!) to memory cards.

Now, the situation has changed – you can store all your mail bodies (not just the attachments) on storage cards! This is handy for everyone (to lessen the load on the main storage) and particularly for people that have upgraded their ‘legacy’ WM2003SE Dell or HP devices to WM5.

Importance for WM5-upgraded Dells and HP devices

This hack is of extreme importance to Dell Axim x50(v), HP iPAQ hx4700, hx2x1x and hx275x users that have upgraded to WM5. As I’ve pointed out several times (for example here), you MUST reduce writing/deletion to/from the Flash ROM for these devices to be usable (that is, to avoid the filesys.exe compaction ‘kicking in’). This also means avoiding synchronizing Outlook mail with WM5-upgraded devices because, by default, they are all stored in the main storage. Now, with this hack, you can freely and safely synchronize your mail on these devices without lengthy filesys.exe compactions!

And, of course, the hack is very important for anyone wanting to store more than a handful of his or her mails on his or her PDA to keep the built-in free memory as large as possible, independent of the Pocket PC model.

The solution

Pocket PC users, especially those using a Pocket PC Phone Edition (PPC PE) device, often ask me how they can be notified of new, incoming e-mail messages automatically. It’s easier than most think – and in no way complicated to set up. In this article, I elaborate on the secrets of fetching your mail periodically, without any human intervention, only alarming you when there is some new mail to report on. I also spend some time on explaining the problems related to this and also how the auto-fetch can be really quickly toggled between disabled and enabled state.

Note that I’ve already – shortly and succinctly – discussed this question in the Mailer Roundup but, as it’s a very large article causing heavy information overload, I’ve found it better to devote an entire, full article to the subject.

To see the advantages of the periodic mail fetching this all involves, I recommend the excellent article The (non)sense of push communication by MS MVP Jaap van Ekris. He explains why periodic mail fetching can be better than even Push Mail.

http://www.smartphonemag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=557&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1