3G Phones and E-mail?

SendItAllToOneAddress asks: "With the advent of the faster cellular phone networks, and an apparent lack of support for WAP among many popular web portals, I'm curious if the readers of Slashdot have a preferred way to retrieve e-mail by phone via Webmail or POP3 access, or are we stuck with the accounts provided by the cell services? I'd prefer not to have to use separate e-mail accounts, or to have to forward my e-mail to the cell phone."

Re:What I want to know is...

[pyrros]

Why is it necessary to check email, send email, surf the web, etc from a cell phone? I still don't understand why phones keep competing to do all of these things. (oh, fp!)

If you need a cell phone, it means you need to communicate on the go. For a lot of people email is an essential part of communication, so email on the cell phone is only natural. Besides, sms is like a crippled veriosn of email, so most geeks would like to have the real thing just for kicks. As for surfing the web, you'll be glad to hear that WAP has failed miserably.

Re:What I want to know is...

[pyrros]

Being expensive is certainly a very big factor but it's not the only one. SMS is imho very expensive (8 cents for 160 bytes) but i use it anyway. Why? because i find it useful enough to justify the cost.

Re:What I want to know is...

[ebbe11]

As for surfing the web, you'll be glad to hear that WAP has failed miserably.

Depends...

With a GPRS-phone it actually works quite well. I use it several times a week.

Treo

[Zack]

My 3G "phone" is a Handspring Treo 300. Since it runs any PalmOS app I have my choice of email clients, many of which support POP3 etc.

This combination of cell phone, PDA, and wireless internet (ssh, pop, web, and even VNC!) is perfect for me. The sprint PCS plas rock. I'm actually posting from it right now!

My previous was an i85s, which supported SMS with an email to ssh gateway. I wrote a little perl script to forward mail only from people on a preapproved list. That was so painful compared to my Treo.

I got it for Christmas and I just can't put it down!

On my computer

[Karora]

I still prefer to read and reply to my mail on my computer.

3G means that when I'm not on a LAN I can get it quicker though :-)

I can't honestly see that changing for the meantime. I filter my e-mail into around 70-odd mailboxes, and it helps me visually to handle the 1000+ e-mails I get each day.

Re:On my computer

[Evets]

1000+ e-mails in 70-odd mailboxes. Stop giving out your real e-mail address!

How does 3g fit into this ?

[pyrros]

Apart from the title there is no mention of 3g in the article. Is the author actually looking for a 3g solution (in which case i can't help because 3g is not available in most of the world, including where i live) or was the 3g buzzword just thrown in for good measure ?

(note: the following info is gsm-only because that's all i'm familiar with)

Getting your mail via webmail can only be done if you have a phone that can surf the web like the nokia 9210i [nokia.com] (gsm 900/1800 only, old, no gprs), siemens sx45 [my-siemens.com] (again 900/1800 only, kinda old) or the sony ericsson [sonyericsson.com] P800 (which works on gsm 1900 and looks way better than the other two). Apart from the cellphone, make sure your gsm network provider supports gprs, because data transfers without it are more painful and more expensive.

If you only need pop3, all you need is a phone with a pop3/imap client (there tons available). Again make sure your network supports gprs.

Of course you could always get phone with decent data capabilities and a pda. If you really want to impress you friends, make sure they both have bluetooth. (bluetooth products: nokia [nokia.com] hp/compaq [hp.com] Toshiba [toshiba.com]

Nokia 7650

[MyGirlFriendsBroken]

I got my nokia 7650 a week ago on orange nad it will pick up mail from multiple pop3 mailboxes over GPRS or normal dialup. It doesn't have a full web browser but sending and reveiving using pop is fine enough from me

I don't know if this phone is avilable in the states yet and photo messaging over MMS is quite cool, especially over new year.

Also for people in the UK Orange have got the phone for 49.99GBP with 50PGB cashback for your old phone provided it will turn on

Sony Ericson t68i

[vandel405]

I have a Sony Ericson t68i from AT&T Wireless. It has pop3/smtp functionality built into it, and i can use what ever email provider i want. It also has SMS and MMS for the record.

Re:Sony Ericson t68i

[awyeah]

I've been successfully using my T68i through AT&T for IMAP/SMTP access and it works very well.

Cooler option for some

[philosophyandrew]

Yes, there are several good freeware pop3WAP services out there and, yes, some of the phones come with robust POP3 support.

For folks who use MS Outlook, a cooler service is provided by www.loudpc.com. This (pay) site gives you a client that provides remote access to all your Outlook data -- you can read/write e-mail, read/change contacts, appointments, tasks, etc.

The service works with WAP as well as from any browser. For those who can use a service like this, the price is reasonable.

imap/pop with ssl?

[divingbell]

I have not been able to find any info whether any of all these email-capable phones have support for ssl or tls,
e.g. sony-ericsson P800 and T68i.

Can anyone fill me in on this?

Mine isn't G3 but I can use POP

[chrisseaton]

I have a non G3 phone (an old Sony J5) but it supports email with the POP3 protocall, which I've simply tied to a normal email account.

Not 3G, but nonetheless useful for me!

[helixblue]

The way I handle my e-mail on my cellphone is pretty basic.

I've got a perl script that checks my IMAP4 mailbox every 3 minutes between 8am and 11pm. It's available at http://toadstool.sh/files/mailgeek.pl (it's a modded version of another script I use, as you'll be able to tell).

mailgeek.pl searches for any message in INBOX that is older than 10 minutes old, but still has an unread flag. If any message is found that matches these requirements, it gets compressed with the fine email2sms software, and e-mailed to my Cingular email to sms gateway at phone#@mobile.mycingular.net. Sadly, the gateway doesn't seem to support concatanated SMS's, so I only get the first 160 characters of the email2sms compressed e-mail.

Usually, this is well enough for me to get the idea of the message. If it is not, my Sony-Ericsson P800 has an IMAP4 client built in to it, though I don't use it much because the Cingular GPRS costs are absolutely ridiculous.

Hope someone gets ideas from this.

VerizonWireless Get It Now

[didiken]

I've got a Motorola T720 phone, which it claims it support 3G (in future) or their Express Network.

I subscribed to their $2.99 USD http://www.sodapopmail.com/ SodaPopMail BREW applet. Works okay for me for quick check.

Also many VerizonWireless phones work with a laptop using a USB cable as a PPP modem. My Powerbook running Jaguar has no trouble following the guide from John's page at http://homepage.mac.com/jrc/contrib/mobile_office/

Reqwireless, or check around...

[cybermace5]

If you really have a 3G phone, like one of Sprint's Vision-enabled phones such as my Samsung SPH-N400, it can run J2ME apps.

Using J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition), you can easily program just about anything you want. Several POP/IMAP access programs exist; I tried Reqwireless and it worked (though not exactly how I hoped). If you have a J2ME phone, go to microjava.com and you can find email clients and tools to develop your own.

Don't need 3G, J2ME or POP3 on phone

[jn42]

You will probably find, with a little looking, that most cell carriers support retrieval of mail from POP3 (and IMAP) and delivery to the phone. For example, with T-Mobile in US, I've configured the T-Zones (gprs) service to periodically poll my linux box for POP3 email on a user name I created, and I have my email set to redirect a handful of sources to that account. (important stuff I don't want to wait for) Whenever mail reaches that account, the service messages my cell that I have mail, (includes basic headers) and the built-in browser (WAP, nothing special) lets me retrieve and view it.

For T-Mobile, this will work with about 80% of their current phone models, not needing email support on the handset or "3G" buzzword. (Nokia 3390 and Samsung R225 DON'T support it, lacking even a WAP browser)

I know that the same effect is possible with Nextel and with ATT Wireless (at least their GSM service) and believe it is offered by Verizon and Sprint on their CDMA as well.

You DON'T need a fancy J2ME supporting phone, let alone a laptop or PDA. Those will offer other, more flexible options, but are not required. All you need is the willingness and know-how to look into what the service already offers, and leverage it.

BTW, IIRC the Nextel service also offers a voice reading email aloud, although I doubt it is more than servicable quality on anything but basic messages.

j

disclaimer - I DO sell cell-phones, but am not employed by any of the carriers, so am unlikely to profit in the least if someone reads this and decides they must have this service. I mention T-Mobile because that's the service I currently use, and so am most familiar with.

Forward

[kruczkowski]

I have a ATT new GSM/GPRS phone and what I did was just setup a rule to forward a copy of all my mail to my phone via SMS. It's free to recive SMS's on the phone, and I like to know when someone emails me. cure's the shakes when I'm away from the internet for more than 6 hours.