2008 Sept 21 — I have a Palm Treo 755p. My company has provided it to me. Several of my colleagues have migrated over to the iPhone, at their own expense. But I’m still a Treo user. I’ve mentioned before that I have several applications that I want to keep using that are written for the Palm. Now that Apple lets people write other tools for the iPhone, it will surely accumulate a good library of tools.

Email applications on the Treo have been decidedly old-school. Versamail came with my Sprint Treo. It could successfully send and receive messages, usually, but for some reason the auto-synchronize feature really didn’t work.

ChatterMail seems to be a much more modern tool. It can successfully synchronize email while I’m doing other things. It has some settings that make the battery life acceptable, even though it’s constantly online. I have the Sprint unlimited plan, so the data doesn’t cost any more.

I haven’t bought it yet; I’m in the 30-day free trial. After two weeks of trying it, my Treo started rebooting. I noticed that it would reboot shortly after ChatterMail would connect. It didn’t reboot if I didn’t let ChatterMail connect. I just re-installed the files on the Treo, and that seemed to resolve it.

UPDATE 2008 September 24 — ChatterMail/ChatterEmail stopped working for me recently. It would connect to the server, login, then my phone (Treo 755p with Sprint) would reboot/reset. Apparently resets are a common problem with ChatterMail users. “JoshM”, the site administrator for http://www.chatteremailforum.com/, seems to represent the software. In one long and active thread about resets, he seems to have finally given up late one night:

Sorry you are having issues with Chatteremail – I would recommend that you contact your place of purchase and request a refund.

Josh

But why should software work fine for so long, then suddenly break? ChatterMail had worked for about two weeks before it died.

I deleted ChatterMail from my Treo, then re-installed it (i.e., copied the PRC and PDB files back over to the Treo). I was storing my mailboxes on the SD card, so the newly-installed ChatterMail detected that, and imported the mail. When it connected, the phone rebooted.

I considered doing a hard reset, then re-installing ChatterMail. But I’m not that committed: if that’s the sort of maintenance required, then I don’t care to use it. So I wanted to find a way to use it that doesn’t require that sort of maintenance.

Now I’m on this theory: what if there’s something wrong with using an SD card? Perhaps there’s a critical bug that breaks when the SD card file size for the mailbox goes above 8 MB or some such. So I un-checked “Store mail on SD card”, and now I’m testing it. At the present, it’s working fine.