I used to love my Good mobile email. Having seen Ewan wax lyrically about it in previous blogs, I took the plunge in April, got myself a Nokia E61 and a Good-enabled account with Fasthosts.
It was all lovely and dandy for a while, but in the last few months it’s gone completely to pot. The application itself is constantly crashing on my phone – which wouldn’t normally be the end of the world except it holds all my contacts. This means I’m getting phone calls and texts from people who are in my address book but no name coming up on the screen – just a number. I’ve sent a few embarrasing replies to texts asking who people are – which really makes me look stupid.
At the moment, the last email in my Outlook inbox is 1.53pm today. The last one on my Good app? 10.09pm last night. There’ve been quite few emails in between those times. No amount of synchronization, restarting, prodding poking or hitting my phone seems to want to make it sync.
Just to check it wasn’t just me, I talked to Ewan. He’s running good on a Nokia E61i – and is having the same problems. Maybe Good will fix it in their new version – announced as ‘coming soon’ a while back but no ones quite sure when…
In the meantime, I’m seriously considering my alternatives. I like my push email, in fact I rely on it to keep in touch when I’m out and about. However, if it ain’t doing the job, why bother keeping it?
Answers on a postcard please.. especially if you’re from Good themselves.
Update: about three hours after I wrote this blog entry, all my mails mysteriously appeared, and my mailbox is now up to date. I haven’t heard anything official from Good or Fasthosts as to why it was broken, but then I wasn’t expecting a miracle.
Not sure what the incentive to bother with any intermediate provider is really unless they offer sync of additional data items. I sync direct to Exchange on my E61 and get push e-mail and all the contacts / calendar syncing you could want. I originally did it with the free MailforExchange, but now with the better Dataviz Roadsync (£25 and quite light on memory). And if you want an even cheaper hosting provider, then a Zimbra account can provide the same sync interface and generally cheaper monthly tariff than a full-on Exchange account. http://www.simplymailsolutions.com do ’em and offer a good SLA.
I was actually considering contacting Good because of all the good things I have read here. I tried Seven Always On and it didn’t do it for me.
Alex, have you actually NOT received some of your emails?
Same experience here – I am one of Good’s biggest fans, but can’t wait for release 5.0 to come out – I get regular crashes on the E61i and coming our of the tube it doesn’t always reconnect when it has lost a a signal for a while.
Let’s hope Good beomes great again with 5.0
Bin the ‘Good’ middleware! (is it classed as middleware?). I’ve been using the Dataviz Roadsync application for months (one off fee for the software) and it syncs with my Exchange account without fault. I can recommend it 110%.
It does make you wonder what the future holds for Blackberry (as much of their revenues came from the software side of the business) – direct sync interfaces to Exchange servers is certainly the future.
/Chris
I used to be a big fan of Good messaging – though I eventually switched back to Mail4Exchange. The few things I don’t like about it;
– It only tets you use a subset of contact details – I can’t see people’s Birthdays for example even though they are stored in Outlook.
– I can’t send a message with an attachment. I mean WTF is that about?
– It screws up applications like Truphone because these apps don’t can’t interact with Contacts properly.
I’m also hoping v5 brings some major goodness back to Good. I think unless these guys can come up with something really clever i think the days of these middleware sync systems is over.
As an aside, Nokia just updated their Mail-4-Exchange client to v2 with lots of new goodies including meeting request support and GAL lookup. That almost kills poor old Roadsync – but given how slack they seem to be in updating their product I can’t say i really care..
http://www.businesssoftware.nokia.com/mail_for_exchange_downloads.php
After reading what Ben said above, I signed up to simplymailsolutions.com for a Zimbra mailbox.
I downloaded RoadSync onto my Three N95 and installed V2 of Nokia’s Mail For Exchange onto my T-Mobile E61.
I setup Thunderbird to retrieve mail via IMAP.
I use a mac so I installed the Zimbra iSync plugin.
Then I forwarded all my everyday e-mail accounts to my new simplymailcolutions.com Zimbra mailbox.
Everything sync’ed perfectly, my two handsets and the awesome Zimbra web interface picked up my Apple Addressbook contacts and iCal schedule. Unlike Good it used the built-in apps on the handsets… while the Nokia mail reader isn’t as nice as the Good one it seems to work ok.
Since I honestly can’t see much difference between RoadSync and Mail For Exchange I guess I can remove it from my N95 and use the Nokia app.
Push E-Mail on two different handsets at the same time, a decent IMAP IDLE implementation on my desktop and calander/contacts sync’ed seamlessly between all devices!… All without a single penny being spent on Microsoft Exchange… have I reached some kind of geek nirvana?
No… fast forward to this morning…
Both Roadsync and Nokia MfE have the concept of “peak” and “off-peak”, you can tell the device to only sync automatically during peak hours/days… something the BlackBerry does very well and that I’ve always said was lacking in Good. I set both Roadsync and MfE to be always-on pushing mail 24/7/365… so I could test it.
This morning there is a flood of e-mail on my laptop but nothing on either of my handsets…
RoadSync, while showing absolutely no errors in it’s log, claims to have last sync’ed at 1:32am.
Nokia MfE claims to be “Connected” but has yet to sync since 7:28pm
*sigh*
@Ben: Just about to make an update to this entry 🙂
Following Steve’s tip about the new version of MFE, I’ve installed it on my E61. Just removing Good, so let’s see how it performs..