Ocasta

Mobile Tech have a good article on accessing GMail from Series 60 phones. My experiences have been a little different so I thought I'd note them down.

The standard Series 60 mail client on Series 60 v2 phones such as the 6630 and 7610 works, althought the 6600 does not. The client can be configured for POP over SSL (Mailbox, Settings, Security - On). Although the GMail instructions indicate that TLS is necessary to connect to the SMTP server I didn't find it so when I tried. Of course, Google may change this and implement security at any time.

I tried Profimail last week and it didn't support SSL. This week it does! Well done to Lonely Cat for a quick update.

Whichever method you use, you may get the Untrusted certificate message whenever you connect to the GMail server. I tried two identical 7610's and one happily accepted the certificate and one didn't! If you do get this message then it can be overcome by installing the Thawte SSL Domain certificate. You can downloaded it from here.

Although Mobile Tech were having problems with the GMail atom feed, it still seems to be working for me.

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Tried and tested successfully with

• Nokia 6600
  
• Nokia 7610
  
• Sony Ericsson P900/P910 (when the Equifax certificate is installed)
  
• Orange C500
  
• Treo 600
  

Thanks to Vasanth & Eric for feedback.

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I thought it was time that I investigated loading certificates onto phones. The driving force for this was that while trying GMailChecker on a number of handsets I discovered that some, the Nokia 6230 for instance, don't give the option to connect to an HTTPS URL when it has an untrusted certificate.

I ran into a number of problems, some of which I managed to overcome.

• You can't just Bluetooth or SMS a certificate on to a phone. It has to be OTA from a web page.
• When you set up a certificate for download in has to be a binary one, not BASE64
• Many non-smartphones only accept WTLS certificates. This is a problem for GMail since I can't find a WTLS version of the Equifax certificate. So I still can't get the midlet to run on a Series 40 phone.

I now have a web page that you can use to download and install the correct X509 DER encoded Equifax certificate onto your phone. As I said, only some phone supports this type of certificate. It can be found by pointing the phone browser at http://www.ocasta.co.uk/cert.html Successfull installation and configuration means one less question each time you check your GMail.

So far the Series 60 MIDP 2.0 phones I have tried (6600 & 7610) both install it successfully. After installation you have to go to Settings, Security, Certificates; select the Equifax one and under Options set it to trusted for Internet connections. Done.

There was an added bonus too. I found that I could install the certificate on the Sony Ericsson P900/P910. Once installed, the midlet no longer crashes. GMailChecker now works on this phone! However I can't get the browser to install the midlet OTA. For now it has to be installed via a PC.

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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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