Thursday, April 24, 2008

The story of one Hotmail and a Blackberry

If you are the owner of a Hotmail email account and a Blackberry (I own neither, but my uncle had the former for years and acquired the latter a couple of weeks ago to get his emails faster) you may have already tried forwarding your mail from one to the other, perhaps because the person at the store told you it works with *all* web mail services (as was the case with my uncle), merely to discover the sad truth: it doesn't!

Open source to the rescue. After a bit of looking around I found this great little POP3 server proxy called FreePOPs. What this great little program does, is it allows you to retrieve your free web mail messages with any application or device that supports the POP protocol (including a Blackberry). The best part is that it works with most popular free web mail providers out of the box (and some less popular ones too) and it is extensible, so in theory support could be easily added for almost any service. It's also very light and very much in the background.

While this is an easy way to get your Hotmail messages on your Blackberry, it can also be used to get them in your Gmail inbox. Gmail's options include retrieving emails from a different account that supports POP3 access. The only downside with Gmail's POP retrieval is that you don't get to control how often it checks - which at times could mean as long as an hour between checks. Still, it sure beats paying for Hotmail Plus just to be able to forward your mail.

Pesky email problems like these are all too common, which is also why I'm posting this up in the hopes that this might be of some use to people out there looking for a similar solution.

You can find a download link for the program as well as more info right here.

2 comments:

Michael Mullin said...

Has your uncle called Tech-Assistance? Gmail and the BBdevice I had earlier this year worked wonderfully.

I didn't try Hotmail, but I have a hard time believing that MSN would stop their accounts from syncing to a BB.

Doing a POP hack around MSN to get your blackberry to work defeats the point of having a RIM device.

Fima said...

Michael Mullin:

"Has your uncle called Tech-Assistance? Gmail and the BBdevice I had earlier this year worked wonderfully."

Gmail and BB devices do work wonderfully, but my uncle has a business email account with Hotmail and Gmail's POP retrieval doesn't check the server for new emails frequently enough -- which is really the only issue we had with regards to Gmail.

"I didn't try Hotmail, but I have a hard time believing that MSN would stop their accounts from syncing to a BB."

As they say, seeing is believing - www.hotmail.com :P.

"Doing a POP hack around MSN to get your blackberry to work defeats the point of having a RIM device."

Luckily my uncle completely disagrees, he is very happy with this hack! :)