Notices

Something that may be also worth investigating is the possibility of maintaining two connections at the same time (WLAN *and* GPRS) so that every e-mail-related connection (POP3, IMAP, SMTP) will be routed through gprs0 and every other connection (e.g. HTTP/S) will be routed via the WLAN.

This was possible with Symbian (and I loved it for it). This is obviously possible with Linux, and thus with the N900. Problem is how to set up the routing properly without interference with the standard connection tool (ICD/libconic, etc.).

If you fetch your mail from, say mailhost.yourlastname.com - or any other domain that can be traced back to you, like some people do, it is potentially possible to identify you personally from the fact that your phone tries to connect to that host - encrypted or not. Sure, this is kinda paranoid thinking, but for those who care this is a nice option you guys put together here.

One thing not being addressed though is the key of this question: Is there a way to set it up so that only some accounts are checked based on connection.

Let me present it another way. I have a huge work e-mail box, and a large spam-laden personal mail box that take ages to update and lots of band width to do so. I also have a spam-blocked e-mail or two that only a few people have. I always want modest to check the low flow accounts, but NEVER want it to check the large ones unless I'm on my home or work network, respectively.

Everything presented so far is still about an "all or nothing" approach, enabling all accounts for update or not based on connection. That's good for some people, but I was hoping for a "some or more" approach.

Currently the only way I know how to do this is to setup per-connection smtp/pop/imap connection settings. You put bogus credentials in the main one, and proper credentials in the connections you want to use that account with. But that takes a lot of work, and causes errors every check when not on the high-use networks.

I wish there were just an "enable/disable" option, like HAM has for repositories, per e-mail account. Enabling and disabling those by hand, or with gconf based on connection could then be much simpler.

With Symbian possible? Would you mind to tell me, even it is obvious offtopic. I never heard of such possiblity. For sure not on-board, or? Which program?
On the N900? No idea.

@woody
Also no idea. This would be a nice feature!

At least on the E75 (S60v3 FP2) you could set any AP for the e-mail program. This was the case for many programs which instead of using the global default would allow setting an AP or an AP group only for that program.

I may pull out the E75 from my bag (I use it only, and rarely, for navigation). Actually this reminds me now of Profimail (the best ever mobile e-mail client). I swear if I had the time I would port/clone it for the N900!

Instead of trying to work around it, wouldn't be easier to patch modest to check a list of allowed connections (global or per account) before fetching? I'm not familliar with modest's code but it seems doable, if not easy.

Uh, sometimetimes too much wood out there to see a single tree (you know what I want to express ).
Of course it was / still is possible with Symbian to define access points for some specific programs. Simple and easy.

Please take some time
This would be perfect mail client for mobile Linux devices.

And then somebody corrects the calendar and I will never ever switch to any other device ...

Vote for Enhancement 12670

I've decided to stop using Modest and use Alpine instead. It's command line, of course, but actually if you enable mouse support you can click on things with your finger (or better, with the stylus).

But for me the actual benefit of alpine is that I can use the HW keyboard without any need of touching the screen

The only thing missing is a way of notifying a-la-Maemo when I new mail comes. Pine/Alpine can write to a FIFO file when a new mail arrives. So all I need is a script which reads from that FIFO and makes a notification (vibration, LED, text -- it's all just a couple of dbus-send commands).

When I do that I'll post details about it. I'll miss Nokia Messaging, but having a full-blown IMAP4-capable kick-*** e-mail client on a N900 is worth everything.

(OK, no off-line IMAP, but you can locally save your e-mails.
Alternatively, I might investigate actually using offlineimap so that both pine and modest can fetch from the same local server).

I guess this is off-topic here, but I installed and configured dovecot (IMAP server) and offlineimap (IMAP synchronization) so I can read/delete/manipulate my e-mails (for now only gmail) using both modest and alpine

By using offlineimap we have all the flexibility we want in deciding when to synchronize and when not. I'm using now the built-in option of autorefreshing every 10 minutes. You can also run it as a normal program (not a daemon), so that e.g. one could set up and ifup script that executes it depending on which connection has been established (e.g. if WLAN, which one, if GPRS, depending on whether you are roaming and/or how much you've used of your data plan, etc.)

I still have to make a script for providing maemo-style notifications when a new mail comes in (for now modest is doing that, but once I remove modest, I will need to do that in my offlineimap wrapper).

Pretty cool I dare say