Re: About email accounts, email folders and backups via activesync on WM6.1


"Delta007bhd" <Delta007bhd@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:d40771da-950d-4eba-b313-a425941a1994@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hello all,

I am totally new to pocketpc's and activesync and I did some reading
on the internet and in help files but I am very confused whether this
info also applies to my personal settings. First I'll tell you exactly
what I have and then I'll ask the questions:

I have a Samsung Omnia i900 smartphone running on WM6.1 that I bought
in Belgium, Europe and I have Proximus as cell phone network provider.
For internet at home my ISP is Telenet which gives me a mailbox ending
with domain telenet.be for which I can create up to 5 email accounts
(I use 2 addresses). On my laptop I am using Windows XP Pro with MS
Outlook 2003. I managed to sync outlook from the laptop to the
smartphone via a USB cable and ActiveSync. The data that I synced is:
contacts, calendar, email, tasks, notes and files, so basically
everything. This was successful and I now have an oulook email folder
on my smartphone that contains everything that my laptop's outlook
has.

In outlook email on my smartphone when I select menu, send/receive is
greyed out. So I assume I have to set up an email account to be able
to receive email on my smartphone. I added this account with the exact
same settings as in outlook on the laptop and named the account "my
email". Now, besides the folders "messaging" and "outlook email" I
also have the folder "my email". From this folder I can click send/
receive and in comes my new mail.

The Outlook mail account has two purposes- originally it was for syncing emails from a PC to PDAs without an internet connection- the thoery was you'd sync your email to the device before you left the house/office, read and compose replies while mobile, and sync again when you got back, and the replies would sync to the PC's Outbox and be sent. That functionality is still there as a sort of "legacy" scenario. These days the Outlook mail account is primarily used for Exchange servers- if you enter server settings into the device, you can send and receive mail on the road through the server.


Now the questions:
Q1: When I now click send/receive on my laptop I will get the same
mails, as if the mails were all kept on the server. Does this mean
that my smartphone is by default set to keep everything on the server?
I couldn't find any setting for this in my phone.

Yes- with POP email, the designers assumed that you'd archive your email on your PC, so the mobile is designed NOT to delete them from the server since your PC might not have retrieved them yet.

On my laptop however
I see that it is configured to NOT keep mails on the server. Does this
mean that if I receive mails on my laptop, I will not anymore be able
to receive them on my phone?

Correct. There are two solutions for this- preferably, switching from POP to IMAP (if your email provider offers IMAP) would fix the problem, since IMAP is designed for multiple computers/devices accessing the same account. If you open an email on the computer, for example, it would be marked as read when downloaded to your device. Deleting it on one would delete it from the other, etc. The idea is that you wouldn't have to deal with the same emails twice.

Assuming you can't use IMAP, you can set the laptop not to delete messages from the server when received, but instead let them expire after x# of days.


Q2: Why does my phone have 2 different folders for email? One "my
email" folder with an inbox, outbox, trash etc and with the account
settings I created, and one outlook email folder with also an inbox,
outbox, trash, and all other folders that can only be synced with my
laptop. Why can't they be merged?

Like I said above, it's a legacy function left over from the days when most PDAs had no way to connect to the internet, and relied on the Activesync connection to transfer emails to/from the device. The modern use scenario is to use Pocket Outlook with Exchange, or to use an IMAP/POP account for sending/receiving email to/from the device. In your case, you should probably uncheck "email" in Activesync and not bother syncing email with the desktop- just sync email with your email provider directly.

Like in outlook on the laptop where
I have one "personal folders" that contains everything and from where
I can send + receive + organise/save emails in separate folders and
even choose to send from one of both email addresses that I have (Send
from xxx or send from yyy). If I now want to add my 2nd email address
into my phone, I will have 3 different folders instead of one! What is
the logic?

The logic is that you're trying to use a hammer to drive a screw! ;-) The Outlook account isn't designed for what you're trying to accomplish. If you want to check two (or more) email accounts on the road, you simply setup each POP/IMAP account on the mobile and don't use the Outlook account.

Q3: When I want to send an email with my phone, I've tried this via
the "outlook email" folder as well as the "my email folder" but the
message stays unsent in the outbox of my phone and after a minute or
so I get the error message "The message(s) could not be sent. Check
that you have network coverage and that your account information is
correct. Then try sending again.". Did I do something wrong?

Probably not. Some ISPs assume email sent from "off network" is spam. They reject SMTP sent from a "foreign" network like your cellular provider. The solution is to check with your ISP and see if they have different SMTP settings for use when off network (often they specify SSL or authentication and an alternat port like 587 instead of 25) or check with your mobile operator and see if they offer theri own SMTP server for their customers to use, e.g. smtp.yourmobileprovider.com instead of smtp.yourISP.com.


Q4: What if my laptop would crash and I want to put all mail folders,
tasks, notes, files back to my laptop OR when my phone has failed and
I want to restore the other way? I have tried this to test ActiveSync
by first backing up my outlook.pst file on the laptop and then I
deleted my contacts from the phone memory. Then I synced and to my
amazement - even before I could check settings in activesync - as soon
as I connected the usb cable it started synchronising immediately and
all contacts on my laptop were deleted!! Thank god I always make
backups! Can someone please explain the general philosophy that
microsoft uses behind this activesync stuff? I've read lots of people
complain that they lost all their data in this process so it does not
seem very safe to me.

It's as safe as a chainsaw- perfectly safe if you know how to use it! Syncing is a two-way street; the device and your PC are treated as equals, one isn't subserviant to the other. Any changes made on one propagate to the other. When you deleted all the contacts from your device then synced, the Activesync dutifully propagated the changes to your contacts (in this case, mass deletion!) to the PC, just like it would've propagated any changes to phone numbers you made since the last sync, or added contacts you entered on the device since the last sync.

Typically the deleted items would land in the Deleted Items folder in Outllo on the PC, so even if you accidentally did something stupid, you can usually recover. Having said that, I periodically backup my contacts and calendar on my desktop to "backup" folders I created in Outlook. The mobile will only sync with the "default" folders in Outlook, so the backup folders don't sync and create duplicates on the device.


I'm going to stop writing now or nobody is ever going to read all this
but I still have a lot of question marks.

Keep 'em coming...



Thanks in advance for your help.

.