New: Sync Tasks with Toodledo!

Beginning today Premium Service users (and free Premium trial accounts) can sync with the popular task management site Toodledo.



To sync tasks you need a compatible device (iPhones don't have tasks support yet but Windows Mobile, Nokia and Palm Pre phones do). Register for a Toodledo account (free or pro). Enable and configure tasks on our web site---enter your Toodledo username and password. Note that you need to enter your fully-qualified Toodledo username (typically your email address).



Finally enable tasks sync on your device. Windows Mobile setup looks like this:

Nokia Mail for Exchange will list tasks under the 'Content synced' once enabled:



The Toodledo API doesn't provide real-time change notification, so the service checks for changes every so often. Changes made on their web site will appear on your phone after a few minutes.

Sync your BlackBerry!

BlackBerry® devices can now be used with NuevaSync thanks to a $49 application from AstraSync (they have a free trial). Until recently there were a few compatibility issues with AstraSync and our service, but those have now been resolved. Contact, Calendar and Email sync are all supported, including Push Email service.



After downloading and installing AstraSync please follow these configuration instructions. Your BlackBerry device should show up on the device management page like this:


Check our new BlackBerry device forum for more information, or to report any problems.

Sync on.

Push Email Service now supports GMX

We deployed new code was today that includes a fix to support the popular free Email service GMX. There have been quite a few users attempting to use GMX with push email free trial accounts and it wasn't until I tried GMX myself that we discovered there was an incompatibility with their IMAP service. Fortunately the problem was easy to fix.

In testing with GMX we've noticed that message read/un-read changes are pushed (unlike GMail) but message delete events are sometimes delayed by up to a minute.

Correct push email configuration on our web site for GMX looks like this:

Premium Service Free Trial Now Available

New today on the web site we now offer the chance to try Premium Service before you buy. A new free trial account can be created here.
Existing users can can be begin the three day trial period by any free service user by clicking "click here to begin" on this page, then click yes on the confirmation page.

Free trial users get all the Premium Service features including Push Email, but they'll continue to use the same server facilities as other free users. Free trial accounts can be upgraded to permanent Premium status at any time during the trial.

Push AOL Mail to the iPhone

Since our push email service works with any IMAP compatible mailbox, there are quite a few services besides GMail that can use it, including AOL Mail. Today we released a service update that gives better support for AOL Mail, including quick configuration on the web site. We did find one AOL-related iPhone quirk so I thought it would be useful to write up complete configuration instructions for an AOL account db1234567@aol.com using NuevaSync account aoltest1:

If you're using a NuevaSync account with an aol.com or aim.com registered e-mail address then service configuration is much easier because the web site notices you may be trying to use AOL Mail and presents a quick setup screen. You only need to enter your AOL password, click yes and you're done:




For folks who like to do things the hard way, here's the full configuration screen filled out for an AOL account:

After verifying that there's a green light in the status display, we can proceed to device configuration. Here's where we need to work around a small issue with the iPhone. Normally we'd enter the AOL email address here:

However, if you do supply an @aol.com address, the iPhone will go into a never-ending spin trying to fetch auto-configuration information from an AOL server (it says "Verifying Exchange account information" but really it's trying to get the server name from the server "aol.com", which of course doesn't have that information to give):

This is similar to the GMail case where the phone tries to fetch config from a Google server and gets an SSL certificate validation error. However in the AOL case it just spins and spins and spins. Other devices such as Windows Mobile allow the user to disable auto-configuration, but the iPhone doesn't. We've found two ways to work around this. The first is to put the phone in flight mode during the account configuration process. This works just fine but it means you lose the chance to confirm the setup is ok because the phone can't test it. The second method is to first enter an e-mail address that doesn't end with aol.com. It can be anything you like. In this case I simply replaced "aol.com" with "nuevasync.com":

This will get you to the next screen without the death-spin syndrome. You can then edit the e-mail address back to the correct @aol.com address and enter the server name http://www.nuevasync.com/.

Clicking next on the screen above should check the username and password and connectivity to the server. Lastly turn calendar and contact sync off unless you're using those since sync performance will be a little faster with them off:

For reference, the resulting setup looks like this. SSL is on, the user's AOL e-mail address is configured, their NuevaSync account, their NuevaSync Password and server name:

And that's it. Open the mail app on the phone and you should see your AOL inbox, and new messages pushed. A bonus vs. GMail is that AOL's IMAP implementation is complete, so message read/unread status is pushed in real time. We did find one potential pitfall with AOL Mail: their SMTP server checks the sender address on messages. GMail's simply replaces the sender address with your account's e-mail address if the device happens to present a different one. In the case of AOL, if the e-mail address configured on the phone does not match the AOL account, then message sending fails. We don't yet have a test for this in the web site, so beware that if you find after configuring that you can't send messages, then probably your e-mail address was mis-typed. It's easy to open the sync account settings page on the phone and change it though.

New feature: GMail message 'archive' support

New in today's premium service update is a feature that many GMail users have requested: messages deleted on the device can now be 'archived' instead of the traditional move to the trash folder. An archived message desn't have the inbox label and hence will no longer appear in the inbox, but will show up in GMail search results and will retain any other labels the user or filters have applied. This is slightly different to the normal IMAP treatment of deleted messages where they'd appear with the 'trash' label and would not appear in regular search results.
The 'Delete-means-archive' feature needs to be turned on in the e-mail advanced settings page. Log into our web site then click the 'setup' link next to Email to display the regular settings page, then click 'Advanced settings'. Check the box at the bottom of the form and click save:



There's no need to do anything else (except perhaps wait a minute or two for the configuration change to propagate to the sync service). All your deletes will now magically 'archive' the messages at GMail.

Edit Word Documents on your iPhone with "Documents To Go"

Recently I heard about a $5 iPhone app called Documents To Go which allows editing of Microsoft Word documents. If you're not familiar with the iPhone, it has built-in viewers for e-mail attachments in several common desktop file formats, including Word, PDF and Excel, but does not have an editing capability. Documents To Go adds that capability, at least for MS Word files today and for Excel in a future update.
The way I heard about this app first was when several users complained (all on the same day, curiously) that it did not work with our service! At first I couldn't understand what a Word document editing app had to do with our service, but once you realize that there's no easy way to get the files onto and off of the device, it becomes more obvious. Add to that the fact that Documents To Go comes from renowned device sync client developer DataViz, and the penny drops...
Documents To Go can communicate with an application you install on your desktop computer, to fetch and save files, but if you spring $5 extra for the Exchange version, it can read and send files through a corporate mail server, or of course our push e-mail service (we fixed the compatibility problem soon after the first reports). It has its own sync client software, and shows up as a separate device as far as our service is concerned. It has its own settings page where you enter your username, password and www.nuevasync.com, much the same as for the phone's built in client:



Then sync your inbox (my GMail account in this example), which will display all the messages with compatible attachments:



Word attachments can be opened and edited like this:



Then saved on the device, back to your desktop, or e-mailed directly from the app which is what I did with this document, and here it is open in Word on my PC: