Thanks, sddawson, for the details on email protocols! Its exactly what I needed to know.Tried Snapper and didn't see too much of a difference to Versamail. Will check out Chatter next. Have you noticed any performance decrease or interference playing music with Chatter running in the background? The IMAP protocol supports a command called IDLE. This lets an email client sit and "listen". When a new email arrives, the IMAP server send an unsolicited message to the client, and the client then retrieves the email. This makes it "push".
Versamail doesn't support the IDLE command, and is therefore only push with Outlook. There is a great Treo email client called Chatter, which does support IDLE. It even runs in the background so it gets notification of emails while you're running other apps. I've been using it for ages in conjunction with a Fastmail account. It's brilliant, and better than Versamail. So brilliant, in fact, that Palm recently bought it! You can find it at http://www.palm. <http://www.palm.com/us/chatteremail/> com/us/chatteremail/. Unfortunately, it costs, but to my mind it's well worth it. You can download a trial to test. If you use an IMAP client on multiple platforms, you have one view of your email, because it lives on the IMAP server. Doesn't require Outlook Exchange, but you can use Outlook, Outlook Express (which both support IDLE too) to access the IMAP server. Even clients that don't support IDLE (Apple Mail for example until Leopard) work fine - they just poll on a set frequency like POP clients, but the mail still lives on the server so stuff you read or delete on one client is reflected on the other. Definitely the way to go! Have fun! [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
