This has been out for a while, but I just discovered it…emoze is a free service that uses Outlook on a PC as the server to push email to a handheld device.

There are a lot of different services that can fool your Windows Mobile device into thinking it’s a Blackberry. This seemed the easiest to deal with without forwarding to another account (such as live.mail2web.com) and it doesn’t cost anything.

You have to install an application on your PC side, and the client application on the PocketPC side. This is only good for folks like me who have a PC continually connected to the ‘net that has Outlook running and checking email all the time. It doesn’t touch your actual POP email server. It only sends email to the device when Outlook downloads the email. So the more frequently Outlook is downloading mail, the more frequently you’ll know about it on the device. Not “true” push email by any stretch…but good enough for me. I typically check email using the PocketPC’s browser (because I don’t like the way PocketPC clients deal with

Any application that lets my PocketPC get email and calendar data without using the buggy ActiveSync is a good thing.

It works nicely, but it does have its quirks.

First of all, it notifies with a pop-up and vibrating on every incoming email. Can’t seem to find a way of turning that off…or at least make it less obtrusive.

Task sync is very buggy. Had to turn it off and use ActiveSync for that.

You can sync the inbox, outbox, sent mail and drafts (which is awesome for emails I start at home but want to finish on the go).

You obviously don’t want to sync the entire folder due to storage considerations, 3 days is plenty. But there is no way to sync other mailbox folders that aren’t subfolders of the Inbox. I had to move some email folders around in Outlook to make them Inbox subfolders in order to get emoze to see them. Not a biggie.

I have unlimited data on the phone so I don’t care about the constant traffic…but some online reports say that emoze can be a big drain on the handheld’s battery. We’ll see.

All I have to do is figure out how to configure the notifications…would even be great if the pop-ups auto dismissed themselves after a few minutes. I sent in a note to support to see what they suggest on the subject.