How To: Push Email for Windows Mobile

Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) has the ability to push email to your Windows Phone. That’s fantastic news for every WinMo user with Blackberry envy! Of course, there are many corporate users with an Exchange server than can push email but for the rest of us this is great.

I actually had my phone set up to simulate getting push email by having Gmail SMS me on new messages. Having my phone check Gmail every 10mins would drain the battery WAY too quickly. If the SMS looked important enough I would do a send/receive on my email to get the message. Not great but at least it notified me right away.

With Windows Live push email service you will truly get push email but there are a few caveats that I wanted to point out to help those that are trying to work with this service.

Remo Knops posted how to set this set up on MobilityMinded.com. For a detailed overview and a comparison to Exchange push mail read Remo’s article here.

Here are the short-form instructions:

1. Download and install the latest version of Windows Live for your Windows Phone. http://mobile.microsoft.com/live/en-us/mobile/default.mspx
2. Sign into Windows Live on your Phone and go through the setup.
3. After setting up Windows Live press the “Menu” button at the bottom right and select “Options”.
4.Select number 3 which is “Sync schedule” and in the Sync frequency select “As items arrive”,
5. Select “Done” at the bottom left of your screen.

That’s it! You are all set to receive your emails right away, as soon as they are delivered to your Live email account. I have gone ahead and forwarded all my other email accounts to Live mail. If you need more details than above please read Remo’s article mentioned above.

Caveats
When I first got the service up and running I was quite pleased but soon started to notice that I wasn’t getting all my emails pushed out right away. It was actually quite frustrating trying to figure it out; I deleted the settings and started all over again WAY more times than I can count (I can’t count high anyway, but you get the idea).

Quick counting joke!!
“After having their 11th child, an Irish couple decided that that was enough, as they couldn’t afford a larger bed. So the husband went to his doctor and told him that he and his wife didn’t want to have any more children… The doctor told him there was a procedure called a vasectomy that would fix the problem but it was expensive. A less costly alternative was to go home, get a large firecracker, light it, put it in a beer can, then hold the can up to his ear and count to 10. The husband said to the doctor, “B’Jayzus, I may not be the smartest guy in the world, but I don’t see how putting a firework in a beer can next to my ear is going to help me with my problem.” “Trust me, it will do the job”, said the doctor. So the man went home, lit a cracker and put it in a beer can. He held the can up to his ear and began to count: “1, 2, 3, 4, 5,” at which point he paused, and placed the beer can between his legs so he could continue counting on his other hand. This procedure also works in New Zealand and Tasmania.”

Anyway, back to biz!

After trying to figure this out on my own I had a stroke of genius and decided to search Bing for an answer to the problem – ya, I’m slow. There were a few sites that mentioned IM clients causing the problem, so I started to play around with that to see if it was causing the problem.

On my Samsung Omnia I’m using a couple different IM clients; Fring and Palringo. At the time of my testing I had Palringo running and had it logged into my Live messenger account. The long and short is that it seems you can’t have a 3rd party IM app running on your phone at the same time as trying to receive push email. If you use the Windows Live Messenger that comes with Windows Mobile you should be fine, but push doesn’t like those 3rd party ones.

You can still use 3rd party IM apps for services other than Live Messenger, just delete the Messenger profile and use the built-in Windows Mobile mesenger.

From what I was reading online it seems that desktop apps may cause the same problem, ostensibly because they are hogging (very technical term) the connection to your account. I will update this post after I have had a chance to test this but I wanted to get this post up to help those that are trying to trouble shoot this now.

If you experience problems post a comment below and we will see if we can help you.

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