If you can’t be bothered reading the rest of the post, this pretty much sums up how I feel about Nokia Messaging, the native email client for S60 smartphones. It works, but is nowhere near the high standard set by K9 Mail for Android, the best mobile email client I’ve had the pleasure of using so far.

The Good



As much as I might shake my head in dismay, it’s probably too daunting a task for most people to look up the POP or IMAP settings for their webmail accounts and transcribe them to their phone. Nokia Messaging makes it easy to get your mobile hooked up with all the popular services. And also Ovi Mail.

And like everything else in S60, Nokia Messaging gives you granular control over what you receive and when. It also adds HTML message support, which wasn’t available in previous S60 email clients.

The Bad

Three things…

Not sure if the blame for this lies with Nokia Messaging or the mail server on my web host. But whatever the case, the sent mail folders on my desktop computer and phone don’t match up.

According to the app the sent folder on my mail server is actually a sub-folder of my inbox, along with the others shown above. Confusing, I know. The end result is that IMAP functionality is broken, at least in the outbound direction.

My second issue is that Nokia gets to see all of my email. Don’t believe me? Here’s proof. And honestly, if I wanted hosted email on my phone why wouldn’t I just use a BlackBerry?

Finally, the grand total of email accounts I’m allowed to access on my E73 is two. For an enterprise-class device, even a cheap and cheerful one, that’s pretty weak.

The Ugly

Now for the really bad news: It’s almost impossible to get Nokia Messaging off of your device.

In theory you can decline the terms of service when you first run it, or call Nokia Customer Care and have any prior messaging accounts deleted. I spent about half an hour on the phone yesterday doing just that — the first time I’ve called Nokia, ever. Luckily for me, the helpful person on the other end of the line did actually know what I was talking about and eventually got the right people to cancel my account.

After re-booting my E73 and checking for software updates this happened. Problem solved, right? Actually no… this ended up being a newer version of Nokia Messaging!

So here we are. I could spend another half hour on the phone and, if I’m successful, give up HTML mail for possibly better IMAP support. Or I could just live with Nokia Messaging as is.

What would you do?