(This article was originally published on Pocket PC Thoughts.com.)
Windows Mobile-based devices, both Pocket PCs and Smartphones, can be powerful tools for working with e-mail. If you're anything like me, you get a lot of e-mail every day, and managing the flow of e-mail when you're away from your desk is a critical task best accomplished with a Windows Mobile-based device. There are several options for working with your e-mail, including POP, IMAP, and Exchange ActiveSync. Each has specific advantages and disadvantages.
If your company only offers one of these options, this article may not be of much use to you—it's primarily geared for mobile workers who have the freedom to decide which of the three options works best for their needs. This article assumes you use some version of Outlook and have a wireless connection to access the Internet from your device. Let's take a look at e-mail options, and when you might use each one.
POP/POP3 E-mail Accounts
POP (Post Office Protocol) has been around for a very long time. POP2 became a standard in the mid-'80s, but POP3 is the version most of us are familiar with, and it's still in use today. A history of POP can be found on the Wikipedia site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POP3). Today, if POP is mentioned, the reference usually relates to POP3. Microsoft Office Outlook Mobile supports POP, and odds are that if you have an e-mail account, it's going to be POP by default. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer POP e-mail accounts, and if you're set up with a Web hosting account you'll undoubtedly be able to use POP as an option. This doesn't apply to Web-based e-mail accounts such as Hotmail.
Fig. 1: After you have set up your POP e-mail account, connect to your ISP and tap on the Send/Receive Menu option (Windows Mobile 5.0 devices) or tap on the Send & Receive button (previous versions of the OS).
Outlook Mobile POP accounts are fairly easy to use. After you have set up the account, all you have to do to connect is to tap on the Send & Receive button (or the Send/Receive Menu item on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices as shown in Fig. 1). However, Outlook Mobile POP accounts have limited functionality. When you check your e-mail, it's downloaded to your mobile device, but a copy is left on the server. This cannot be changed. If you delete a message from your mobile Inbox, it will disappear from view on the Windows Mobile device, but it will still be on the server. The next time you connect your desktop PC to the server, the message will appear in your PC's Inbox. This can be avoided by emptying the Deleted Items folder on the mobile device or by configuring Outlook Mobile to delete items immediately, but it's a bit of a hassle. Another limitation of POP is that it can't support multiple folders. Everything has to stay in your main Inbox folder, and you can't move e-mail to other folders on the server for archiving.
Although most e-mail clients (including Outlook) can be configured to leave messages on the server for a user-definable number of days, the vast majority of people using POP download e-mail to their local computer and delete it from the server. The net result is that all e-mail is stored on your main computer in a single Outlook PST file, and only new messages are accessible on your Windows Mobile-based device. This also means you have to back up the PST file regularly to protect from data loss.
POP e-mail really breaks down as a solution when you introduce a laptop alongside your desktop computer and try to keep your e-mail in sync between the two. For years I tried to do just that. I tried a variety of file synchronization tools to push my 2 GB PST file from laptop to desktop and back again, but they were all clumsy and slow. I've purchased Outlook PST synchronization tools to keep the two PST files in sync, and suffered through all manner of bugs, crashes, and lost data. Outlook was simply not designed to be used in this way, and it shows.
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