Movamail Road Test

I’ve been on holiday for the past week and had no access to a computer, let alone Internet access. I wanted to check my email so I figured I’d give the three email clients I previously tried a more serious test. Pegasus was the one I tried first. It connected to my mail server, which was better than last time, but it just managed to show me the directory structure of my IMAP inbox. It failed to show me any messages. I tried it on a few other occassions but it failed every time, so it was soon deleted.

Next up was Movamail. Once configured Movamail is a nice mail client, it’s quick and can display a lot on the screen. It also has the additional benefit of preprocessing your emails to strip out irrelevant information and sending them as a compressed batch to ease those high GPRS costs. Writing email is also a pleasant enough experience, with the client taking advantage of the phone’s predictive text editor. It also builds up an addressbook of people you send to, but it doesn’t tie into the phone’s address book, which in the K750’s case, has space for email addresses. There were downsides that did spoil the experience:

• The stripping was sometimes too clever and if the author of the email does horrendous quoting, you could end up with a blank email.
• CC’ing people (actually myself so I’d have a copy of the email) just didn’t work.
• After upgrading the software the next email that was sent out had one of the messages from my inbox appended to it.

It’s that’s last point that really killed Movamail for me. I really don’t need my email client sending out private messages to whomever. Even after my testing showed it was a one off I refused to use Movamail to send emails, and used the K750’s built in email client instead. Movamail did prove to be a very good email reader, but for $29.99/year, I’d like a program I could be confident to send mail with too.

Their website appears to have been setup once and been left, i.e. there’s no information on active development, unlike Pegasus, which has a blog. I will report the problem to Movamail at the support address on their site.

One other gripe with Movamail is the amateurish feel of their operation. There’s no company information on their website, and payments are done through PayPal. As far as I can tell they are backed by Tehāma Ventures Inc. so at a guess I’d say it’s mostly programmers at this point and the company still needs to be fleshed out.

A more long term problem is lack of a decent SSL setup with my email account. I changed passwords when I got back to be on the safe side. I guess one possible setup is, before I go on holiday, start forwarding my email to another address, e.g. gmail, then download from their server, which should have a proper SSL setup that will work with phone clients.

I’ll have to see how these two clients evolve. Movamail has it’s problems, but it worked in the field. These upcoming Pegasus features sound like it’ll match Movamail:

PUSH Email (Only available in PRO version): PUSH messaging. Let email finds you, you never have to poll your mail server again. Streaming Email™ (Only available in PRO version) Patented Mail-Download-on-Demand feature saves cost on data usage and delivers the fastest mobile mail experience.

but I’ll have to get it to read my email first! I have no trips planned for a while so let’s hope both can improve in the meantime.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 29th, 2006 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Mobile Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.