Want A New Experimental Email Feature On Your Mobile?

We know how important mobile is these days. It’s impossible to ignore.

Checking the stats on the last email newsletter we sent out it’s clear that a lot of you use your mobile phones for email! (Ok, we do too, so it didn’t surprise us, honest!)

If you want to all sorts of cool features for email “on the go” then our Business Email solution is perfect.

But we also know that a lot of you don’t want or need it.

So we’re now offering, on a purely “experimental” basis (if it breaks then don’t yell at us), a new service.

The solution uses an open source bit of software called Z-Push.

As the name suggests it offers “push email” as it’s essentially an Active Sync to IMAP proxy.

More specifically:

it is an implementation of Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol which is used ‘over-the-air’ for multi platform active sync devices, including Windows Mobile and active sync used on Apple’s iPhone, Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones

We’ve tested it on iPhone and Android and it works well.

If you have a Qmail email account on our shared hosting platform (Minimus / Medius or Maximus) then you can try out the service now.

On your mobile device (in my case an iPhone) you need to add the email account you want to use as an “Exchange Account”

The add account dialog window on the iPhone

then follow the “wizard” to setup the account. For the “server” setting you should use:

activesync-qmail.blacknight.ie

(it’s intentionally obtuse, as we don’t want people using it by accident!)

Configuration screen iphone

And on the final screen you might need to enter your login details again

email settings on iPhone for push email

You’ll now have “push email” on your smartphone.

Want to give it a try? Just follow the instructions above – the most important bit being the hostname / server to connect to

Any questions? Let us know via the comments