After the massive mail migration, which cause me to spend three days of the Thanksgiving four-day weekend at work, and The Boss excitedly unwrapping the brand-spanking new Blackberry that was the sole reason for the migration in the first place, and a week of him answering emails while driving in traffic and taking a dump, or something, said Boss has decided that he really doesn’t like getting notified about every email he gets, after all.
Good thing I’m taking tomorrow off, because I’m going need to be blind drunk tonight.
Ugh.
Okay, here’s the GQ:
Does anybody know a way to disable mail push for a Web Client account short of actually going in and deleting the account from the “other emails” section? Is there even a way to do it?
He wants to be able to click a couple of buttons to get emails sent to the bastard little peice of plastic when he’s on the road, but he doesn’t want to be bothered with them on the days he’s in the office. He also doesn’t want to have to remember usernames, passwords, and server details in order to do this.
It probably means that I’ll end up doing it for him, but I’m hoping and praying that there’s a way around it.
OK, maybe this is way too obvious. But can’t he just leave the Blackberry in a drawer when he is in the office, and work from his regular email (assuming he knows how to use that )? And bring the Blackberry with him when he’s on the road?
I had exactly this problem; I solved it by setting up a free email account (on Wanadoo or something) and setting up a mail forwarding rule on the company mail server - the mail server runs MDaemon, which can be set up to accept email commands to start and stop forwarding.
So when he’s in the office, he sends a message to the mail server to stop forwarding; when he leaves, he sends another to resume it. The Blackberry ‘push’ email is set up only to read the Wanadoo mailbox. This has the added advantage that I don’t have to open a hole through to my mail server for the Blackberry to get the mail.
Can the boss just turn the notification stuff (under Options-Profiles) to “silent”? He won’t get buzzed or beeped at, he’ll only see email when he intentionally looks at his BB.
Your ideas are intriguing, and they occured to me just before I nearly threw the thing in the sink and turned on the disposal. However, for various reasons, they won’t work.
Mangetout:
That one hadn’t occured to me. I’d just have him set up a forwarding rule on his corporate account to his BB account from our cell phone company. He can do that.
Can’t he just turn the radio off on the blackberry? Not sure if this is an option on the new BBs or not. The old mail only ones had an option to turn off the radio portion so you could use it in an airplane without sending radio signals. When you turn it back on it will resync all mail that was sent while off. I am not sure if the ones with the phone built in can do this.
Yup; it’s his cell phone, so there’s no turning off the radio or sticking it in the drawer. Though I might be able to disable GPRS to force GSM; I’ll have to take a look at it on Monday.
We’ve got a power-down policy on the workstations, so we can’t use the redirector. He only wants to get email on the road, anyway - not evenings and weekends.
When I see his wife at the Christmas party, I’ll ask her if she had anything to do with this decision.
What with the company that makes the Blackberry having lost a major patent case against them and looking at shutting down the entire system, I think your problem will soon take care of itself.
I use Snappermail on my Treo 650 (Hmmmm…so shiny…). I have, and use the option, of sending and receiving mail only when I choose to. Users can also have mail replicated immediately, or at designated intervals.
This would be one good option. If he doesn’t want them to even show up in his Messages folder, that won’t work, though.
As far as I know, you can’t disable the mail push from Webclient. However, you can delete the service book from the Blackberry itself that delivers e-mail from Webclient.
To delete the service book (depending on your version):
Go to Options > Service Books > highlight “Webclient CMIME”, click trackwheel, delete.
This works a lot better than having to integrate the POP3 every time as he can just go into Webclient, and I believe it’s under Profiles, and click “Send Service Books” to restore the Webclient connectivity to his Blackberry.
This will cause old e-mails to flood in unless they’ve been deleted from the Webclient account, so you might want to set up auto-aging on the Webclient. Go into “Manage Folders” (button on left side), select a folder within the window that pops up, and set to delete in 1 day or whatever.
)? And bring the Blackberry with him when he’s on the road?