Sharp Zaurus SL-C700 E-mail

Having made a connection to the 'Net from the parking lot of a big box computer store that had an Airport running wide open ( won't name it, but the first screen shot is a hint...), I ran the included e-mail program through its paces and gave it a try. The second screen shot is of the main screen of the e-mail program...

First you have to set up your mail accounts. This is easy enough, first you enter your 'outgoing' SMTP information and then your 'incoming' POP3 information. If your mail requires smtp authentication you also need to set that up - it can be the same or different from your pop authentication. On the pop side you can maintain or delete e-mails off the server when you pick up your e-mail. There is a setting that you can use to limit the size of e-mails you can pick up, but the setting slider only goes up to 800kB. When you set up an account you automatically get an Inbox, Outbox, Sent, and Draft folders. You can add and nest as many additional folders as you want. The program also will do IMAP4.

You can setup rules to filter your e-mail into various mailboxes. The next two screen show some filters that have been set up and the possible combinations you can use for your rules. You can also search your e-mails using the indicated criteria.

The program does most of the basic e-mail functions: You can filter by mail status or mail location (internal flash/SD/CF); sort by Status, From, or Subject; send or pick up mail from all accounts or only from a particular account; forward, copy/move, delete, reply, and toggle status between read/unread mail; you can see attachments - so far I have only had png, jpg, and gif attachments so I am not sure of what other attachments you can access from the e-mail; you can toggle e-mail between text and html; when composing e-mail you can get addresses from the Address Book; you can send attachments, etc. See below for screenshots of an e-mail with an attachment:

Some features that don't seem available (Note: So far I have not spent a lot of time researching this - these features are definitely not available from the gui setup, but perhaps there are workarounds if you tinker directly with the files containing the settings, etc.) include:

You don't seem to be able to do a run to get headers (and perhaps a user-defined # of lines like the TOPLINES command in Post/Lx on the HP200lx) that you can mark for subsequent retrieval or deletion...
While you can do some filtering it doesn't look like you can delete e-mails this way... no 'kill' file
While you can move/copy e-mail and attachments to SD/CF you don't seem to be able to just strip attachments while keeping the e-mail.
You don't seem to be able to toggle so that you see all the headers rather than just From, To, Date, and Subject.
You can't see the e-mail's size.
You can't 'explode' out digests into individual messages.
You can't do newsgroups...
Not sure if you could integrate encryption with the e-mail app.

The bottom line is that this is a decent app that does the basics well. IMO it is better than the messaging on the Nokia 9290 Communicator, but a pale shadow compared to Post/Lx on the HP200lx that can do almost anything, and that in conjunction with Roboweb/Lx runs circles around just about every other e-mail app...