Pocket Informant FlexMail 2006 Norristown PA

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All Pocket PCs come with basic email facilities, whether it's the built-in Messaging application or Outlook E-mail on Windows Mobile 5.0 handhelds. These are adequate but fairly basic compared with desktop PC email software. FlexMail has enough new and improved features to make the handheld email experience more satisfying, and provides much more flexibility when it comes to handling multiple email accounts.

To begin with, you can set up as many accounts as you need, each with its own settings. You can decide whether messages should be retrieved automatically and at what intervals, whether to download just email headers or entire messages and to limit downloads to a specified size. Emails can take up a lot of space on your handheld, so FlexMail allows you to store messages (as well as attachments) on storage cards if you prefer. Configurability and flexibility are key with this software, so you can set up each account to suit your personal preferences. If you have email accounts that use different authentication protocols for incoming and outgoing messages, FlexMail should also handle these quite nicely, unlike the built-in Pocket PC email software. It handles ActiveSync email very well, too, with the option to send replies from any of your other accounts directly from the handheld.

Rather than showing emails as plain text, FlexMail has full support for received HTML emails, although you can't compose outgoing messages in HTML format, so there's no way of adding bold type, italics and so on to your messages. The interface has more scope for customisation than that of the built-in email software, and you can switch between several multi-pane views that show various combinations of a folder tree, message list and message text. It works well in landscape as well as portrait mode.

Finally, most of us need a spellchecker when composing new messages, and FlexMail's own built-in version is a great improvement over the standard Pocket PC offering. You have the option to ignore upper-case words, URLs and words containing mixed letters and numbers.

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