Dan Harkless' Palm OS Email Apps Buying Guide: Introduction

While reading the TreoCentral.com thread "Best eMail program for Treo!", it quickly became obvious that there were too many contenders and too many feature differences to simply remember. Thus I took notes and created this buying guide (which is actually useful for all Palm OS device owners, not just Treo owners).

Though I've added many new entries and updated existing ones since the days of that TreoCentral thread, much of the information did come from it originally, and not everything has been double-checked personally, so there may be inaccuracies. The fields with subjective information ("Other", "Stable", and "Treo support") are especially susceptible to this. In addition, there are lots of areas where I had no data for that feature of that application, so I just put "?". Especially lacking in data are the entries for products that are targeted towards corporations rather than individuals (particularly if they must be used in conjunction with particular Microsoft or Lotus mail servers).

As mentioned on this page's parent, I don't expect to have time to keep this database constantly up-to-date, but if you have some data or corrections to contribute, feel free to email me and I'll incorporate it.

Now to the guide itself. If you want to restrict the data shown, follow the instructions at the top of the search form (which appears at the bottom of the page). As an example, you can type "IMAP" into the "Incoming" text box to restrict the applications shown to just the ones that support IMAP for incoming email. You can also sort the data in a different order -- for instance, you can make the "Application" name be the primary sort key rather than "Author".

The latter is useful for side-by-side comparison of any two or more records. Note that (on desktop, at least) you can resize the frames as desired.