Scalix: push mail on Nokia mobile phone with IMAP IDLE

You have a Scalix server and you’re desperately looking for a free and easy solution to push email to your mobile phone. Just like anybody else, when you think  about push mail, you really think BlackBerry. It’s so standard in these days… It has to be the solution! Well maybe not…

I’ve goggled extensively looking for a way to achieve push mail by installing an additional, open source,  RIM-like server (Funambol, Notifylink, etc…) on my Scalix box, but I’ve never been convinced by any of these solutions. It was either too expensive, too limited, too difficult to set up, insecure,… I just didn’t liked it. Then I discovered IMAP IDLE. In fact, everything was already build in for push mail, both on the Scalix server and on my Symbian mobile phone. There is no extra server needed. Indeed there is no code or installation trick in this post, it’s all there already!

Wikipedia tells us:

The IDLE feature allows IMAP e-mail users to receive immediately any mailbox changes without having to undertake any action such as clicking on a refresh button. This feature provides automated mail updates on the client computer.

In practice, there is a permanent connection between the phone and the server  (just like BB technology). This part is achieved by sending keep alive packets regularly. As soon as a message hits a mailbox, Scalix alerts all IMAP-IDLE clients logged on the matching account, and magically, the message gets to the phone. It’s so fast it even reaches my phone before it appears in SWA or Outlook 50% of the time. Of course when I delete a message or move it to another folder, modifications are applied on the phone automatically. Brilliant!

Just to make things clear, this solution handles messages only, no calendar or contact sync is to be expected. To be precise, Scalix actually handles contacts and calendar items in IMAP folders, which can be seen as emails from your phone. They will not be synced with the phone’s internal calendar or contact list however. Another difference is that only the message header is sent to the phone, not the entire body and attachments. I actually had to check whether I did it on purpose or if it was a limitation. Personally I like this, it saves bandwidth, increases  reactivity and allows me to filter what I really need to read immediately. When opening new mail however, it might take some time to download big messages. So using the IMAP protocol is not equivalent to running a BB server. It’s just a smart way of doing what 99% of the people really care about: receiving their emails on their mobile phones as soon as it hits their mailbox.

This is the most cost effective solution in my opinion. I use a Nokia E71 which is  cheaper, better looking, better build, better featured, lighter and smaller than a BlackBerry Bold. Reliability is decent, but the mail application still crashes once in a while (once a month or so) and requires to manually disconnect from the server (simply by editing your email settings). Any recent Symbian or Treo smart phone should be IMAP IDLE compliant, and some mail clients for Windows mobile exist too. Technically speaking, the overhead in terms of bandwidth is ridiculously low. Expect something like 5Mb/month on a 200Mb mailbox with 20 subfolders synced 24 hours a day.

If you don’t manage to get the phone connected to the server, it’s probably your mobile ISP who’s blocking the IMAP and/or the SMTP ports. Find ports that you don’t use and forwarding them to the IMAP/SMTP standard ports either directly on your Linux box or on your firewall. You can test these settings with any popular email clients that supports IMAP IDLE (Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express, Apple mail, etc…)

For contacts and calendar sync, you still have to use the Nokia PC Suite, but I don’t think it’s a big deal. It’s very easy to sync the phone automatically with Outlook (of course you need the Scalix Outlook connector) as soon it is physically connected to the computer (USB) or within the Bluetooth range. The Nokia PC suite works so well it can even sync your phone from multiple computers (home and office in my case). I’ve never seen anything better than this for resolving possible conflicts. Whenever I have access to one of my computers, everything gets synced via Bluetooth without touching a button. When I’m away and don’t even have a laptop with me, I only use my phone anyway. Every change that I make will be synced perfectly with the Scalix server as soon as I reach civilization.

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