Last Updated on September 22, 2023 by Christopher G Mendla
With email becoming ever more important, you don’t want to be away from it for long.
I have an LG Envy and use Outlook for my main email account. I looked at hosted exchange options. Overall, they are a pretty good option but they can cost around 50 bucks a month. Verizon has an email option for about $20 per month that looks fairly good. It will work if you have a web capable phone and the web package (about 15/month for our plan)
I found a low cost/no cost option that seems to be working pretty well for now. (be careful when messing about with your email settings).
We had one machine that was our main machine which runs Outlook. Outlook was set to delete messages from the server as they were downloaded. That works great when you are only trying to read emails from one location.
What we are doing now is that we changed the advanced settings in Outlook to leave the messages on the server for 1 day and to delete the messages from the server when deleted from the deleted items folder.
Now, when a message comes in, it remains on the server for one day or until I have deleted it and emptied the deleted items folder. The next trick is to set up your phone so you can access a web based email access system that is WAP compatable. One that works for us is www.mailtoweb.com/wap . Since the messages remain on the server for a day, we can leave outlook running while out visiting clients and be able to see messages as they come in and read them as long as they are not made up soley of an attachment.
Here is the basic process (Be careful when changing email settings)
- Set the advanced settings in your Outlook on your main machine to Leave messages on the server, delete after 1 day, delete when deleted from the deleted items folder. The last option lets you clear out the spam before you leave the office in the morning
- Make sure you know the password for your email. (Surprisingly many people don’t)
- Bookmark your online wap email reader such as www.mail2web.com/wap on your phone.
- When you want to check your email, go to the wap mail reader. Mailtoweb’s interface is a little basic on the envy but it does work. You need a little patience. We found it best to work from the “list all messages)
- We have found that sending or replying to a message is a bit quirky from our phone. Sometimes we get a timeout message and send it again only to find out that it really went the first time.
So far, this has been working great. It’s not on the level of a blackberry and hosted exchange solution. However it is a lot better than what we had just a month ago.
There are other online wap readers. We are considering finding an open source reader that we can put on our private password protected website (Intranet). That way, we will have a reader that is not dependant on a third party although Mail2web has been stellar so far
An added bonus is that you can also access your mail from your laptop while on the road. We’ll post seperately on that