Movamail is out! Flurrymail is in!
Edit: Flurrymail announced on May 31, 2009 that they were ending their support for their J2ME application and will cease allowing users to access their personal email after June 5th. I’ve not yet discovered a comparable replacement for it, so if you know of one please comments on this post or send me an email. Thanks!
Not so long ago I wrote a post called Make your dumb cell phone smart with J2ME which showed most of you (depending on the type of phone you have) how to download Java Mobile applications and install them on your phone. One of the applications I gave a thumbs-up to was called Movamail, which allowed you to check and compose your IMAP/SMTP/POP3 email from your cell phone. About 3 days ago I noticed that no matter how many times I tried, Movamail would fail to connect to my email address. I later discovered that their entire website is now dead. So it would appear that Movamail forgot to pay their electricity bill.
I did some looking around for a replacement app and I’ve found one that I feel very comfortable with and have confidence it will not go under in the same manner that Movamail did. It’s called Flurrymail.
I found the Flurrymail applications on www.getjar.com, where you’ll find a ton of J2ME mobile applications (most of them are junk but there are a few gems out there). Flurrymail had received a lot of positive comments, most of which said it was easy to use. So if you’d like to download it click here.
Now when I first set this thing up it asked me to signup with Flurrymail’s website. No big deal. But I will tell you that it’s much easier to do all of this at their website, www.flurrymail.com, instead of through your cell phone. After I filled out their little signup form, I had trouble logging in. I was getting a “Either your username or password is incorrect” error messages, and even after I confirmed my username and password with their “I forgot my password” link, it still wouldn’t let me it. I was about to post a complaint on their support forums, but while waiting for activation from a moderator, I tried to sign in to my new account again a few hours later and it worked. All I had to do at that point was add my email account to my new Flurry account. The cool thing about this is that you can add multiple email accounts to your flurry mail so that it’s possible to check multiple in-boxes from your cell phone at the same time. Not just IMAP/SMTP/POP3 accounts, but also many mainstream web-based email providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, .mac and AOL.
Setting up my email from their website proved to be easier than I had anticipated. All I had to do to configure my IMAP email was enter my server name, username and password and it automatically setup the SMTP settings for sending mail. It literally took about 30 seconds. This app rocks the socks off Movamail in speed and reliability. Movamail would often take a few connection reattempts in order for it to work, but Flurry is very quick and works every time I check my Inbox. Win!
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008