3G Phones and E-mail?

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Posted by Cliff on Saturday January 4, 2003 @09:03PM from the many-devices-one-address dept.

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."

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Treo by Zack · 2003-01-04 21:26 · Score: 3, Interesting

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!
How does 3g fit into this ? by pyrros · 2003-01-04 22:44 · Score: 3, Informative

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 (gsm 900/1800 only, old, no gprs), siemens sx45 (again 900/1800 only, kinda old) or the sony ericsson 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 hp/compaq Toshiba
Not 3G, but nonetheless useful for me! by helixblue · 2003-01-05 09:32 · Score: 3, Informative

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.