Monday, February 05, 2007

How to delete e-mail in WM5 (TyTN etc)

Following up on my previous messages about deleting e-mail on my TyTN, I've now confirmed how to handle e-mail on a WM5 device without accidentally deleting mail off the mail server.

To recap the problem, if you use your WM5 device like I do, to read e-mail on the road that you generally read over webmail, if you delete e-mail on the device but want to keep it on the server (eg, if it's not something you can read or handle on the device, do you want it out of your device's inbox, but still want to read/handle the message over webmail when you're on a computer), it will be deleted from the server when you empty your deleted items folder on the device.

THE SOLUTION: Never empty the deleted items folder on the device. Instead, if you set your mail on the device to only show messages received in the past X days (I set it to 7 days), periodically go into your deleted items folder and move all messages older than X days back to your Inbox, then do a send/receive. When you do the send/receive, the messages will be removed from your Inbox because they're older than X days old, but they will not be deleted on the server, since they're still in your inbox. I've tried this, and the messages definitely disappear from the device but not the server. But never empty deleted items, that will delete them off the server.

The right solution, of course, would be for Microsoft to have a setting whether or not to delete from server when emptying deleted items folder, like they do on Outlook and Outlook Express.

The other solution is to use another e-mail client on the device. I plan to try this, since I'd also like an e-mail client that shows HTML e-mails (rich text), but I haven't tried any yet. If anyone has e-mail clients to recommend, please post them here as a comment.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am assuming you prefer to keep you Inbox clean. But just in case that's not the case, I thought I'd suggest you operate as I do (I have the Cingular 8525). I just leave the messages in the Inbox and let the timer delete them (mine is set to 3 days). As you point out, that leaves the server copies alone.

I assume that (my) type of usage was the intent of the program designers (assuming they had other options). I try to deal with any message that I need to when I read it. Consequently, I (tend to) ignore read messages in my Inbox. Maybe that's too much clutter for you. Sorry if this is "DUH!" post for you...