I really enjoy checking email from my Visor. Until recently, I was happily monitoring my O'Reilly account from any location with a phone jack without having to lug around my laptop. Then one fateful day, our department switched to SSL-enabled email (Secure Sockets Layer). Suddenly, along with all the black hats, I was shut out.
The MultiMail application that I had become so fond of could no longer retrieve mail from the one account that I really needed. So the search began for a solution.
With a little nosing around, I discovered Eudora Internet Suite 2.1 for the Palm OS that includes the Eudora email client, web browser, and SSL/TLS security library -- all compatible for uploading to your PDA from Linux, Macintosh, and Windows computers. Windows users get two additional goodies -- conduits for desktop mail synchronization and bookmark coordination. That's right, you can automatically synch your desktop bookmarks with those in your Eudora browser for the Palm.
There are other niceties too that I'll discuss later, but the feature of this software that I'm most interested in is the e-mail and browser support for SSL and TLS (Transport Layer Security) for server authentication and data privacy. To my knowledge, Eudora is riding ahead of the pack in this area for Palm OS email and web applications.
When you hot-synch the package to your Palm device, you add the email (308k) and browser (150k) applications, plus a sslplus library (108k) to your system. The library enables SSL and TLS capability for both Eudora applications.
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When you set up your email account(s) in Eudora, you have the usual "basic," "receive," and "send" panels to complete with your POP and SMTP information. But thanks to the additional sslplus library, you also have a fourth panel labeled "Security." Here you are presented with authentication and security options for both incoming and outgoing mail. You can even review the security certificate available from your server by tapping on the "Server Info" button.
It only took me a few minutes to configure my accounts. I then logged on to the server and was downloading my mail as smoothly as I normally do from my laptop.
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Anyone who is coping with lots of email on a mobile device knows how quickly it can become buried beneath kilobytes of information. This situation had become particularly troublesome for me since I began leaving two weeks of mail on the server as a backup precaution in case of hard drive failure on my laptop. Considering that I receive more than 100 messages a day, that means there are always at least a 1,000 of my messages sitting on the server at any given moment.
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If I were to fire up my new Palm client and access my mail, I'm sure it would soon explode as a result of being force-fed hundreds of email messages. The Eudora developers are hip to this situation, and they included a nice feature that allows you to control the number of recent messages sitting on the server that you want to download into your mobile device.
So now when I check mail from my Visor, I simply set how many of the most recent messages I want to view, and that's all Eudora fetches.
In addition to that, I can limit the number of lines that I fetch from each message. I usually cut-off my downloads at 30 lines. That way, if someone sends the next great American novel to my email account, I only receive the introduction on first download. Of course if I want more, I can change the parameter.
Both of these features demonstrate that the Eudora developers really understand mobile computing in the modern world. There are many other goodies too, such as multiple signatures (accessible via a drop-down menu), multiple accounts, fully configurable filters, and column control. Plus, on both my Visor Platinum and Prism, Eudora runs very fast.
I have become increasingly frustrated with proxy-based web browsers on mobile devices. Sure the pages look good when the proxy server is happy and traffic is light. But more often than not, access is slow, if available at all.
Eudora includes a basic TCP/IP HTTP/HTML browser that goes directly to the web site you want to view. You can enter any URL you desire -- you're not limited to the sites that have signed-up to the proxy service.
The browser supports strong cryptography -- SSLv2, SSLv3, and TLSv1 -- including session resumption for increased efficiency. Ingeniously, the browser uses the same sslplus library the e-mail client uses keeping application size to a minimum.
You can cache browser pages for offline viewing, and the performance is really fast.
There are tradeoffs though. Some of the speed comes from the fact that the browser ignores all .jpg and .gif images. This is a text-only world you're surfing in. Plus, you get an all-too-intimate view of how table-laden many sites are, resulting in the need to scroll down a ways before you get the information that you actually want to read.
But these limitations are offset by the freedom to go anywhere on the Net that you want without restriction. If you have enough free memory on your Palm device, you may want to keep your proxy-based web browser too. But if I had to choose just one to keep, the Eudora application wins palms down.
Now here's the most amazing feature of all -- this entire package is a free download from the Eudora download page.
The package includes many features that I haven't discussed in this article, but none are as important as the ability to control the number of email messages you want to download from a secure server using your Palm-based device. I'm very impressed with this suite, and I've already removed my other browsers and email clients. I just don't need them anymore.
Derrick Story is the author of The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers, The Digital Photography Companion, and Digital Photography Hacks, and coauthor of iPhoto: The Missing Manual, with David Pogue. You can follow him on Twitter or visit www.thedigitalstory.com.
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