How to: Get your Gmail through Nokia Email on your S60 3rd Edition smartphone

Published by Steve Litchfield at 7:12 UTC, December 19th 2011

Summary:

With Google withdrawing its Java-based Gmail client from general circulation and with no guarantees that it'll carry on working, many S60 3rd Edition phone owners will be looking at other ways of getting their Gmail fix. The most obvious solution is one that many of us have avoided for several years, with memories of the first few iterations of Nokia Email (née Messaging) still shrieking horrors in our minds. But, with a few caveats, Nokia Email now works surprisingly well - it's certainly worth giving it another chance. Here's a walkthrough and a few tips/pointers.

Some of the objections to Nokia Messaging in the past have been that:

a) it's slow
b) setup required mobile data
c) its normal operation swallowed up vast amounts of system disk space (C:)
d) it introduces a third party into the email workflow
e) its installation took up the best part of 10MB, also on disk C:

Add them all up and many people, understandably, steered well clear of the system, especially on devices which were already struggling in terms of speed or capacity.

With the demise of the official Google Gmail client however, I thought I'd take another look at Nokia Email/Messaging - since its introduction two years ago, the client has been updated many times and is quite a bit more efficient and more forgiving. I was testing it on the QVGA-screened Nokia N86, typical of the breed of S60 3rd Edition smartphones which haven't been able to benefit from having an equivalent system baked into their firmwares (as, for example, the Symbian^3 devices have). If the N86 can run Nokia Email then most other Symbian phones from the last four years should be fine too.

Addressing the main complaints from above:

a) it's still slow, especially on the limited processor power of the S60 3rd Edition generation. See below for thoughts on this....
b) setup (at least in this incarnation) no longer needs mobile data, just a valid network registration (e.g. "Vodafone")
c) disk space requirements for working space seem to be vastly less - I've been running Nokia Email on the N86 for a week and I've only lost a couple of hundred kilobytes, for example.
d) again, in this incarnation at least, there was no request for a Nokia sign-on, and delving into the settings reveals standard IMAP addresses, so there's no sign of email having to get routed through Nokia's servers.
e) installation still eats up multiple megabytes, but this is not a showstopper.

With regard to speed - or rather, lack of it - it's important to recognise that Nokia Email is a multi-threaded application, i.e. the UI and background processes operate at the same time. So don't expect a direct response from a keypress - although you may well get one, sometimes it takes a second or so for the UI's input to get passed through to the other threads. In practice, all this means that you have to have patience - there's no speeding through email as you might expect on a desktop application. Yes, it sucks that so much patience is required, but on the other hand I can't believe that, in late 2011, a S60 3rd Edition phone will be your primary means of email access.

If the speed is, ultimately, too much for you, then note that there are still third party email clients for Symbian, notably Profimail, though this requires some setting up for use with Gmail - another tutorial for another day!

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Gmail, as a standalone (Java) app is no longer supported (boo, hiss....); do check SW_update for an update to Nokia Email for your device before starting; on starting Nokia Email, you'll see this icon menu - alternatively, there should be an 'Email setup' icon available too.

  

The starting point in the 'New' wizard is just to give your Gmail address; Nokia Email servers then know all the settings needed for your email host; within seconds (literally) you're looking at your Inbox view. This is initially empty, waiting on the first connection.

  

If you're not automatically prompted to connect up, use the Options menu, as shown; a pop-up will always let you know when a connection or disconnection happens; within a minute emails will start showing up in the Inbox view - be patient, since the first connection is going to grab a few dozen emails and this will take a few extra seconds - wait for them to download before doing anything! 

But, essentially, you're good to go, you can click on an email to bring it up as text and then, optionally, click through to the (even slower) HTML view. If you're anything like me though, even this initial success won't be enough - you're going to want to dig (with me) into the settings, to understand what's going on and customise Nokia Email....

  

Use the main Nokia Email icon in Applications and then use 'Back'. This will take you back to the S60 homescreen initially, but ignore this. Go back to Applications/Email again and this time you'll see the main email menu again (above, left); click on Settings and then on 'Google Mail'; let's start with 'Mailbox settings'.

  

It's a good idea to fill in the 'Reply to' and 'My name' fields, since these will be used in the email headers and will give recipients a better email experience; scroll further down this dialog and turn 'Signature' on and you can then put in a paragraph of text to include at the end of each email - a useful time saver.

Next, go 'Back' to 'When to sync' and check the 'Update interval'. Importantly, notice that this isn't a 'polling' interval - IMAP email is already 'push' email and, while you have a valid connection to the IMAP server, new Gmail emails will simply come across. The interval here is how often Nokia Email should intervene and force a connection - it's surprising how often your connection will get lost through coverage problems, for example. In this case, I've set Nokia Email to force a reconnection at least every hour.

Although you're basically done in terms of set-up, you'll want best integration with S60 and its homescreen too...

  

Specifically, you'll want your email notifications and summaries on your homescreen - this may not be a fancy Symbian^3 phone with an email widget, but you can have the next best thing. Head for 'Tools/Settings/General/Standby mode' and then click on 'Email notification'. (Note that all this is on the N86 - other S60 3rd Edition phones may have slightly different dialogs.)

  

Turn 'Visibility' on and then pick your Gmail as the mailbox to 'view'. Back out of Settings and take a look at your homescreen - you should see the number of new emails and a listing of the most recent.

Turning our attention to Nokia Email performance, yes it's slow, but you can improve things slightly by avoiding the temptation to click on 'View HTML message' - most emails have a perfectly readable plain text version included.

  

In addition, you can set Nokia Email to grab just a bit more of each email in the background, so that it may be all ready for your perusal as and when. You remember the Nokia Email settings dialogs earlier? I've been experimenting, as shown, with setting 'What to sync/Retrieve' to a slightly higher number of kilobytes. The default is '2', I've been trying '5'. Comments welcome if this tip helps you or if you have other optimised settings that you can pass onto others.

Finally, a tip. Above, you'll have noticed a little red triangle next to each email as you cursor down over its title - this is quite a new feature and a big time saver. If you know what you want to do with an email without even opening it, for example because it's something you were expecting and just needs forwarding, or if it's obviously junk mail, then press right on your d-pad and you've got some handy quick one-click functions.

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Nokia Email has improved markedly in recent times. Its eye-candy-heavy UI still grates every now and then, given the speed of the processors for some of these smartphones, but as a backup or secondary email access system it's usable. To be honest, that's about the status of the Java Gmail client for the last few years too, so at least this isn't a step backwards.*

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 19 Dec 2011

* I did notice that there doesn't seem to be a way to mark emails for 'followup' (i.e. 'starring', in Gmail parlance) - am I missing something? Anyone?

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