Chatter certainly enjoys a reputation of being a powerful IMAP-based email client. My own experience with it, as well as that of at least a couple of others, is that it resulted in instability on my Treo. Its author would no doubt (justifiably) say that this is because other applications, not Chatter, are the cause of the instability in the presence of Chatter. This for me is a distinction without a difference, since I am unwilling to give up the other applications (whichever one(s) could not work and play nice with Chatter). IMAP with Chatter may be the way to go for just push email, but Versamail's implementation of push support for Exchange gives me push calendar and contacts in addition to email - something Chatter cannot do. For me, and now for two of my clients, this makes Versamail and Outlook with hosted Exchange the way to go!
One slight correction: the service that one can use with Versamail (and Outlook) is called "Microsoft Exchange", not "Outlook" nor "Outlook Exchange" as it's referred to below. My hope is that Palm with take the best of Chatter (IMAP support so Exchange isn't required for push email (not everybody needs push calendar/contacts); support for multiple folders, not just the Inbox (Versamail only supports the Exchange inbox)) and combine them with the best of Versamail (stability, support for Exchange Activesync) and add a support for tasks and Notes via push (if, in fact, Exchange supports this). Now THAT would be something!! Cheers, Don -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of sddawson Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2007 6:15 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Treo] Re: Push Versamail --- In [email protected], "Bill Motzing" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Thanks again. I'm still getting up to speed on e-mail technologies. > Fastmail.FM provides IMAP email accounts that allow you to use Versamail and > sync with Outlook because the folders are all kept on a server. Basic > service is $14.95 one time fee. > > I'm still not fully up to speed with all email technologies, however I > understand IMAP is partially push technology. From what I understand it will > alert you but not send the whole message. Anyone that has more info > regarding Versamail and IMAP push capabilities please let me know. As an > aside, the iPhone will use Push IMAP, a new protocol based on IMAP. 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.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!
