FlexMail 4 Handles All Your Windows Mobile Messaging Needs And More

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I actually started using FlexMail around the middle of last year and it was not because I wanted to. Reason was, I was not much of a power user when it came to emails on my Windows Mobile device so I saw no need to invest in a powerful application when Pocket Outlook would serve me fine. However, when I encountered missing inbox problems after a WM6 ROM upgrade, I decided to give it a shot and I’m glad I did.

Introduction

FlexMail 4 is WebIs’s flagship email application that replaces FlexMail 2007. It’s an award-winning software, with honors dating back to 2004 has been highly touted since then. It’s the complete messaging application that should have come pre-installed on your Windows Mobile. Like all WebIs products out there, FlexMail comes with a trial (2 weeks) for users who are interested to test it out and licenses go for $29.95. It supports Pocket PC running WM2003 onwards and Smartphones running WM5 onwards. So why would anyone want FlexMail 4?

Installation

It’s not just a full-featured application that was mentioned earlier, but it’s also very easy to use. Installation was a breeze. You selected where you wanted it installed and accept the agreement and you’re good to go. For those curious, it took up 3579kb of space. Due to the nature of the application, it is highly recommended (to the point of MUST) that you install in on Main Memory. There have been many cases where users in the beta program installed it to their storage cards and that caused data corruption. Chances are, it’s because the cards could not wake up in time to receive the data which thus led it to being damaged. So if you plan on installing FlexMail 4, be sure to do it on your main memory.

Setup

As you can see from the screen shots above, there are a lot of settings that you can play around with. This is one of the strength’s of FlexMail (like all WebIs products) and you can tweak just about anything you want. For those of you worried about the huge amount of settings, fret not because the default ones work just nice for majority of users. Just try it out and you’ll see. In fact, I started out on the default settings and made changes along the way.

As for accounts, you’ll have to manually enter the data yourself. For such a task, I would highly recommend a remote application like MyMobiler (which is free) so you can enter those data quickly. FlexMail 4 also allows for you to import and export your accounts (as well as your settings) in XML files. So the next time you are installing applications such as FlexMail from scratch, you don’t have to go through the tedious process of setup. Just import them and you’re good to go. One tip for using the XML files to your advantage is to create XML files of your other accounts on your computer so that you can easily (and quickly) import them into FlexMail 4 when you set it up. Be sure to fill it up correctly though.

If you do decide to manually enter, WebIs has included templates and a wizard as well to minimize the pain. No complaints there and in no time, all my accounts were good to go.

Manual

If you’re not sure of what each setting does, there’s always the manual that you can refer to. It’s 42 pages of PDF goodness and helps you do just about anything you could with FlexMail, from understanding what each settings does to managing your accounts. It really goes to show that WebIs has taken every possible effort to ensure that their users get the most out of the product.

It Just Works, Even For HTML Messages

In a nutshell, FlexMail 4 just works. After setting up my My Today Screen (MTS) and personal email on the application, I tried sending a message from my desktop using the Gmail account to my MTS email. As you can see from the screen shot, I received it in it’s full glory, right down to my image signature. Of course if you are on those limited data plans, you could just as easily choose not to download images to save on bandwidth. There were no complications that I encountered when trying to read or compose a new mail (which I will get to in just a short while). Even the most novice of users will come to appreciate this.

Composing Emails

As easy as it was for me to read my emails, it was just as easy to set one up and send it as well. When I start to enter the recipient’s name into the address bar, FlexMail 4 starts to search for matching names and provides you with a drop-down list of matching ones. Very nice!

What about email addresses that are not in your contacts? Well the first time you enter it, FlexMail will ask if you want to add it to your list of contacts. Select ‘Yes’ and you’ll be brought to the contact screen to enter the details. There’s no need for you to note the email address down and do it later. With FlexMail 4, it’s very intuitive and straightforward. However, if you find such a feature troublesome, you guessed it, you can always turn it off. There’s something for everybody.

Easily Switch Accounts

What if you got an email from one account but want to reply with another account? This was something that was possible on Gmail and ThunderBird and it’s now possible on Windows Mobile devices, thanks to FlexMail. Just select the account you want to send it from and you’re all set. No need to copy the mail or send yourself a copy. Do it all from the composing screen in one easy step.

Integration With Pocket Informant

One of the key things that attracted me to FlexMail was the fact that it integrated well with Pocket Informant. If there was an email that I needed to take note of, I could easily create an appointment or task from it. When created, the subject of the email becomes the appointment/task (which you can easily change) and the body of the email is added as a note for that item.

On the other hand, if I wanted to send an email while I was within Pocket Informant, I could easily select the contact and send the email. FlexMail will open (provided you made it the default mail application, otherwise it would be Pocket Outlook) and you just type your message and send.

Push Mail For Anyone

With all the talk about push mail, every one who hears about it for the first time can’t wait to try one. Chances are, unless you have an Exchange account (which I will get to later), you’d not be able to enjoy push mail.

Not anymore though. If you are using FlexMail 4 and your email host supports IMAP IDLE, you’ll be getting the push mail experience without the push mail cost. Whenever a new message arrives on your email server, you’ll also receive it almost instantaneously, provided you have an active connection and the application is running. It does support traditional push mail as well which will be covered later on.

Corporate Ready

I guess the majority of users of FlexMail 4 will be those in the corporate world. With the abundance of features that it packs, you can now leave your laptop and work and just survive with your Windows Mobile device to keep in touch with your office.

Exchange Support
Picture courtesy of WebIs FlexMail 4 manual

It supports Exchange so your email is pushed to you (if you set it as so) whenever it arrives on the server. Reply to it immediately or save it for later. With FlexMail’s ability to insert the original email in HTML format for use in reply and forwarded messages, your colleagues would find it hard to believe that you were away from the office when you sent that mail.

Meeting Requests

It used to be that when you had a meeting request, you had to use Outlook to accept or decline it. What if I told you that you could now do so from your Windows Mobile device? Because that’s now possible thanks to FlexMail 4. And if your device is hooked up to sync with your Exchange Server, your calendar will also be updated accordingly. Otherwise, just add it directly from FlexMail.

Flags

It gets better. For those among us who access emails from a variety of devices and platforms, it can be hard to keep track of the which messages have been replied, forwarded or flagged. Well you wouldn’t encounter that problem with FlexMail because all those information is synced as well. Replied to an email on your desktop? You’ll see the annotation in FlexMail. And vice-versa too.

Multiple Security & Authentication Support

All these features would be useless to you if you could not access your company’s email because the email application lacked the proper security features right? Well, FlexMail has you covered in that area too. It’s got SSL2/3, TLS and even SOCKS and CRAM-MD5 (of which I have no idea what they are) that you could use for sending and receiving mail. So now you’ve got the security and the features to take your company’s communication on the go. What else is there to hold you back?

Wealth of Customizations

I’ve already mentioned before that you can do a lot of tweaking thanks to its extensive settings but I wanted to cover some of the more common customizations that you might want to play around with.

Determine How Files Are Downloaded

Pocket Outlook has a similar feature but it’s considered lackluster when you compare it to what FlexMail offers. For example, you could choose whether to download all messages or only the new ones, you could choose how many days worth of messages to download and/or only choose to download messages smaller than a certain file size. Or maybe you only want to download the first 13KB of a message (or whatever number you desire). You could even determine different settings for different folders if you wanted to. How’s that for full customization of downloaded files?

Choose Your Notifications

Maybe some messages are more important and you want to be notified of them and not for others. If this sounds like you, FlexMail has the ability for you to set it up accordingly.

Powerful Rules Engine

If you are one of those users who receive a lot of emails everyday, chances are you have a filter (or many filters) in place to help you manage the volume. As you’ve guessed it, FlexMail has a rather robust rules engine that you can play around with to move, reply, mark and do a lot more to incoming messages. Setting up can be a chore but once you get it up and running, it’ll definitely save you a lot of time in the future.

Notable Useful Features

There are a few nifty features that you might want to take note of if you are planning to get FlexMail 4. Some are accessible by any users, others are better suited for users with the right hardware.

HotKeys

This is one of those suited for those with the hardware requirement. To know what they are, press your any button on the DPAD and it will bring up a list of all the hotkeys available. To bring up this list the next time around, you’ll have to press 0 or H. For those without a dedicated keyboard or numpad, you can still access and use these hotkeys with your SIP.

Asian Language Encoding

I did not install this plugin as I had no use for (and it would take up extra space) it but for our readers from the from across the seas might find this a lot more useful. From what I gather, there’s support for Japanese and Korean among others such as Thai and Vietnamese. With this plug in, you can then view the messages in the way they were meant to be.

Character Sets

Well you don’t have to install the plugins to enjoy the character sets because FlexMail already comes with its own extensive list of it. My only wish was that this was an option instead of being forced upon us because I would assume that there are a substantial number of users who have no use for it.

Need To Search?

If you’ve ever found yourself searching for that one message in a sea of hundreds, you’ll know just how tough it can be. Well FlexMail helps to each that burden somewhat by helping you find that message. Type in the search term and choose which folder to search (or search all if you want) and it’ll bring up a list of results.

It works great if the term you are looking for does not occur too frequently or you have your messages organized properly into folders. However, I wished that the search engine was more robust in a sense that it could limit search to say only those in the ‘From’ or ‘Subject’ field.

Today Screen Plugin

For those who like to keep track of their messages, be sure to activate the Today screen plugin for FlexMail. While you could use the default Message plugin, it has the problem of not showing all the FlexMail accounts. The only way around this is to use the plugin that came with it. There’s not much customizations that you can do here but just enough to make it useful.

As good as FlexMail 4 is, there were some issues that I encountered during my usage:

No HTML Signature

You can add as many signatures as you want but you can’t use HTML signatures when you send messages from FlexMail 4. When I asked Alex Kac about this, his response was:

…we do not yet support HTML in the actual response which includes signatures. This is far more complex to do and much harder to do on a mobile platform right now. We’ve looked at some possibilities including writing our own… while the other possibilities take up about 2-3 MB of RAM just for editing. So we’re not keen on that either. We’re still working on some other ideas.

So WebIs is aware of this and working on it. No word as to when you can expect it or whether it would even appear on this release so we’ll have to wait and see.

Big File Size/Resource Hog

Another thing about FlexMail, and this is more of Windows Mobile fault than anything, is the location of files. As mentioned earlier, you should install it to main memory to prevent any problems when using it and you could move your other related files (using the application) to the storage card. However, there is a risk of corruption as explained by WebIs in the manual:

The reason this risk exists on Pocket PC devices is because when you put your device to sleep the Windows Mobile device “invalidates” the file handles to these databases if they are on a storage card, but not if they are in main memory. Upon waking up the database system tries to reconnect to the storage files, but there are situations when it times out and you end up with a storage file that may get corrupted and cause FlexMail to hang as it waits for a result from the database server. Windows Mobile does this invalidation because storage cards can be removed during sleep. Under Windows Mobile 2003 you can edit the registry to change this behavior so that the file handles never get invalidated. Under Windows Mobile 5 and 6 this behavior is hardcoded and is no longer changeable. To make things more confusing, the behavior is hard-coded by the device maker, not Microsoft® so each device can behave differently. Some devices may have a 1 second timeout, some may have a 4 second timeout, some may have no timeout at all.

So unless this one get’s sorted out, I recommend you keeping it all on main memory and look at alternative ways to lessen the load (such as using IMAP and only downloading the last 1 day of emails and only the first 5KB or something like that).

Finger Friendly/Interface

Ever since the iPhone debuted last year, a lot of emphasis has been placed on finger-friendly applications for Windows Mobile. Pocket Informant 8 had elements of this but sadly, that’s missing from FlexMail 4. I had hoped for some sort of better user-interface but that’s missing. Definitely something WebIs should look into.

Does Not Download New Message Only

I use IMAP and sometimes, I read some messages on the desktop and leave the rest to read on my way home. As such, I would prefer to have it only download the new messages. There is an option for such an operation within FlexMail 4 but somehow, it is not followed.

This means that when I sync my device with the email server, all messages are downloaded, be it read or new. While the ones I’ve read are marked as such, it does make me wonder why this is so. I hear that it’s an IMAP limitation but is there anyway to get around this? Or to remove the option for IMAP so that users know it’s not possible?

Better Notifications

For those with many accounts to monitor, having only 1 kind of notification (pop up window) can be a limiting factor. I was hoping that in such instances, FlexMail 4 would allow you to better customize notifications. For example, if I received an email from a certain account, it would only beep and if was from another account, I get it to play a jingle and vibrate. This would be a lot more useful in helping users determine if they need to pull out their Windows Mobile device or save it for later.

Search Could Be More Powerful

While we’re on the topic of improvement, I would love to see FlexMail 4 soup up their search feature. At the moment., I can only limit the parameters to folders. What I would like to do is have other parameters as well such as ‘To’, ‘From’ and ‘Subject’ field for starters. This would definitely make it even easier to search for those messages and save time scrolling.

What I Like

• Robust and powerful, yet easy-to-use.
• Detailed manual to help users along the way.
• Receive emails in one account and reply with another.
• Integrates well with Pocket Informant 8.
• Well-suited for corporate use.
• A lot of customization options available.
• Comes with a Today screen plug-in

What Could Be Improved

• Support for HTML signature
• Better use of resources.
• Addition of a finger-friendly interface.
• More notifications customizations.
• More powerful search engine.

Conclusion

Even with some of these features lacking or not working, FlexMail 4 is one application that will be on my Pocket PC for a long time to come, unless some other application can displace it. Most of my email accounts are on Google servers and the ones I tried with exchange worked great as well.

If you’re in the market for an email application that works great with your Windows Mobile software, be sure to give FlexMail 4 a go. As you can also see, it’s not just an application for the power users among us as even the basic of users would find the additional features (which are missing in Pocket Outlook) a nice welcome.

Retailing at $29.95 is a decent price to pay for something that can really help you with your productivity. Think of all the time you could save because you’re now better equipped to handle them. Still not convinced? Then go ahead and try the trial a go. You’ll be doing yourself a big favor and you’ve nothing to lose.

How do you use FlexMail 4? What are some features you would like to see?

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