Server Forwarding in S60 Smartphone Email

The easiest way to aggregate messages to a mobile email account is to have the original accounts forward the messages. If your original email account is on a Unix server, you can simply place a .forward file in your home directory with the following line (it keeps a copy of the message in the original account and forwards a copy to your mobile account):

/username, you@mobile.address.com
If you use the procmail utility (see http://www.procmail.org/) to manage your Unix email Inbox, you can add the following rule to the end of the .procmailrc file to copy all incoming messages to the you@mobile.address.com address:

:0c
*
! you@mobile.address.com
The advantage of procmail is that it supports a complex set of filtering rules. You can determine which messages to forward to the mobile account based on the sender and the content. For instance, you can avoid forwarding mailing list messages or autogenerated messages from forums. When you use it together with a spam filter, you can also avoid forwarding any message that might be spam.

For corporate email accounts (or non-Unix accounts) where you do not have access to the home directory, you should ask the administrator to set up the forwarding service.

Filtering and Sandbox for Mobile Email

In addition to providing convenient access to all your messages, an account dedicated to aggregating your email can make mobile email management a lot easier than before. Here are some use cases for a dedicated mobile email account:

Filtering
We typically do not need to read all messages on our phone. For instance, one of my email accounts receives an alert message from every post to a discussion forum I monitor; another account is subscribed to a high-volume mailing list. I certainly do not want to read these messages while I am on the go. You can set up the aggregation account to aggregate only certain messages, and to filter out some messages for later processing when you are in front of a desktop computer.

Sandbox
Multiple email clients from phones and desktop computers create message management issues. In particular, as I discussed earlier, if you delete a message from your phone, the desktop client cannot recover it or archive it later. You can use the mobile email aggregation account as an email "sandbox." You can download, view, and delete any message in the mobile account from your phone. The regular accounts still keep all your messages when you are home, where you can download the messages via your primary email client.

When you send or reply to a message from your phone, it is a good idea to Cc yourself so that your desktop computer has a record of it later.

Ideally, the mobile email aggregation account should be a standard user account on a Unix/Linux server, with basic support for POP and SMTP. Most Unix/Linux-based ISPs or web hosts provide such services.

Make mobile email more efficient with email forwarding and filtering solutions

Most of us have more than one email address these days. For example, I have separate email accounts for business, personal, news group, and web commerce needs. However, not all email accounts can be accessed directly from a Nokia mobile phone:

Some accounts might require SSL or APOP authentication, which is not supported on all phones.

Some accounts might require connections from computers in the same corporate network. The mobile phone connects from the wireless opera-tor's network, and hence they are certainly outside of most corporate firewalls.

Servers such as Microsoft Exchange are known to provide substandard POP/IMAP services. They prefer you to connect via their proprietary protocols, which are not supported on Nokia phones.

Even if you can access all your accounts from your phone, it is a hassle to thumb through the phone's lengthy menu options (especially for Series 40 devices) and check the mailboxes one by one. If you do not check all the mailboxes at one time, you might forget which ones you already checked the next time, and you'll have to go through all of them again. It would be nice to have a mobile-accessible email account that captures all your email messages in a single mailbox.