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GMailChecker midlet

Posted by Martin on Oct 19, 2004 in GMailChecker

Since moving to GMail one of my frustrations has been my inability to check my mail from my phone. I've seen articles about setting up POP3 access, but that was not what I wanted. When I saw that the latest new features added an Atom feed then I saw an opportunity to make a small step towards my goal. So the I set about writing a J2ME Midlet that took this feed and displayed the same information as the GMail Notifier does.

With a little searching around I found MobileAtom which turned out to be a great starting point. With some modification and some trimming of the code I arrived at GMailChecker v0.9. Unfortunately the GMail feed uses HTTPS so I have ended up using MIDP2.0 limiting the number of handsets that will run it.

While GMailChecker runs happily in the emulator, real phones are a different experience. So far I have tried and succeeded with the Nokia 7610 & 6600. Both of these sometimes report an IO Error, retrying the request then works. However, on the P900 this error always occurs and retrying then causes the midlet to crash :-(

GMail currently uses an Equifax certificate that is not present on most phones. You will therefore get asked whether you want to connect to this untrusted site.

Please let me know your experiences with other phones.

For the next release I will continue to tidy up the UI and hopefully get to the bottom of the IO Error.

GMailChecker v0.9 Jad
GMailChecker v0.9 Jar

It can also be downloaded via Jad helper

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» GMail Checker from Aimless Words
GMailChecker is a java midlet that can be installed on your phone and used to check your new messages in your GMail account. It requires the use of the GMail-provided Atom feed. Using this feed, it will present the new email in your Inbox. It has only ... [Read More]

Tracked on November 1, 2004 04:29 PM

» GMailChecker MIDlet from franklinmint.fm
Ocasta: "I set about writing a J2ME Midlet that took this feed and displayed the same information as the GMail... [Read More]

Tracked on November 8, 2004 04:47 PM

Comments

Hi Martin,

Have just installed your util on my 7610, but when try to check (after giving login details and connecting to my usual GPRS server, O2) I just get a "cheking for new mail..." message for a couple of minutes, then a timeout message (error 30).

Any ideas?

Posted by: Jim | November 7, 2004 07:47 PM

I have successfully tried GMailChecker with Orange and T-Mobile on UK networks, but have not tried O2. If the GPRS APN is a full internet one then I am not sure why it would time out. I can only suggest retrying.

Unfortunately I have not found anyway to control the timeout period yet.

Posted by: Martin | November 10, 2004 10:33 AM

v0.9 download & install doesn't work on Sanyo 4900 (which does support MIDP2.0 quite well, though somewhat slowly) via SprintPCS. Gives an "attribute mismatched" error & refuses to continue download.

Posted by: Ted Samuel | November 11, 2004 01:47 AM

I need to revist the jad file, it seems to fail on some phones.

Posted by: Martin [TypeKey Profile Page] | November 11, 2004 08:44 PM

Can you make it work for Nextel?

Posted by: Slammed | November 11, 2004 10:05 PM

Please, make a MIDP-1.0 release for other phones like Motorola A830/A835: I could test it for you.

Posted by: Matteo Riso | November 16, 2004 09:47 AM

Unfortunately MIDP-1 does not support HTTPS

Posted by: Martin [TypeKey Profile Page] | November 16, 2004 10:02 AM

It does NOT work with the 6620. General System error: -1.

Posted by: jonte | November 25, 2004 07:26 AM

System error -1 maybe just a timeout. Did you try a few times or just once?

I'd be suprised if it dodn't work at all since the 6620 is supposed to be very similar to the 6600.

Posted by: Martin [TypeKey Profile Page] | November 26, 2004 11:25 AM

You might be interested in knowing that Gmail is now supported by mail2web.com - try http://mail2web.com/wap from your phone. One thing I find a bit annoying though is that it displays oldest messages first, instead of most recent first.

Posted by: dr.bob | January 11, 2005 10:28 AM

Tried your midlet v0.9 on a motorola e398. It dosent crash howver dosent work either. It shows checking for emalils message and then says Connection Problem null in 5 - 10 seconds. any chance you can fix that ?

Posted by: Binoy | May 2, 2005 01:20 PM

I have a Motorola Razr V3 on CellularOne GSM... and I keep getting an HTTP 301 error. I think it's a problem with the web service - but I'm not sure.

Posted by: Neal | January 4, 2006 07:36 PM

Google changed the RSS URL and I haven't got round to testing and uploading a new version of the Jar file.

Posted by: Martin [TypeKey Profile Page] | January 5, 2006 09:07 AM

I have a motorola E398 and it shows a HTTP 301 error when using GPRS
On using WAP it shows a "null problem"

Posted by: rahul1 | May 18, 2006 07:25 PM

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