Are you looking for push email on your Windows Mobile device, but you're not with a company that uses Exchange Server? You've already tried Hotmail and you don't like it. You've also tried the trick where you have your Gmail or Yahoo account send you a text when you get mail, but then you have to look at an SMS message and then go retrieve your mail right? We've been using our Treo 800w with Gmail for awhile now and were frustrated that Gmail did not provide a push option for Windows Mobile.
We found a little program called PushEffect that mimics real push email. It's not perfect, but it does do quite a nice job. Here's how it works. You tell your mail server to send you an SMS when you get new mail. PushEffect intercepts the SMS and doesn't show it to you, but goes out to retrieve your email, and it appears that your email is being pushed to you. Very slick.
After you install PushEffect on your WM device, you perform a quick setup in the application, but first, head on over to your mail server. In our case, we used Gmail.
We went into Gmail's Settings to enable the option to forward all new messages to our SMS address. We checked the box that told Gmail to keep a copy of the message on the server. That means that Gmail will send an SMS to our phone whenever new mail arrives. We could have setup filters to only forward some of our mail, but we did the general send all function.
Once that was done, we went back into our Treo to launch the PushEffect application. You'll find it in Start - Programs - PushEffect. By the way, when you launch the program don't open another program or you'll have to go back to Start - Programs to launch again. PushEffect does not show up in the Task Manager so it's hard to tell if it's running. It survives a soft reset, but there's no harm in running the program from its icon again.
When the program comes up you fill in a few details and you're all set. You basically have to tell PushEffect to look for a unique string of characters in the SMS messages that come from your mail server. It's usually easy to just use the @ sign as stated in the User Guide. With the Treo 800w however, it's not that easy. Palm's Threaded SMS app messed things up quite a bit. We had a hard time at first because PushEffect did not recognize our SMS messages from Gmail. In fact, we wrote to the company and they didn't know how to work around Palm's Threaded SMS app. With a little bit of digging around the web we found the picture above. A user posted it after figuring out how to use PushEffect with his Treo 800w.
We setup our settings like the picture and it worked! Now when an SMS from Gmail comes in we don't even see it. PushEffect intercepts the SMS message and goes out to get our Gmail. It's fast and frankly, awesome! You don't see the SMS and for all you know, you're getting your mail pushed to you. In case you're wondering PushEffect does not affect other SMS messages not sent by your mail server. Everything works as it should.
The program is not perfect. Every once in awhile we'll get an SMS that PushEffect doesn't catch. We've noticed these are usually sent from a server that does not have a return email address. Sometimes Twitter notifications don't get caught, but most of them do. We've gotten perhaps 4 stray SMS messages in the last 4 days but we've received hundreds of emails.
Though not perfect, PushEffect gives us about 99% of what we were looking for and creates the illusion of push email. That is really outstanding. It really is a must have program for anyone with a Windows Mobile phone and Gmail or Yahoo, so we're giving it our pdaBlast Top Pick Award!
Try it at the link below. At $19.95, you can't go wrong!
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