And the bonus? Palm OS 5 does not contain the built-in mail program that was on earlier Palms. I'd installed and played with the Tungsten-supplied VersaMail application and its Lotus Notes conduit, and found it to be serviceable, but harder to configure at the PC end, and not totally Notes friendly. Pylon does not understand VersaMail. However, once I'd installed Pylon, I found a file called mail.prc in the \Program Files\Palm\Pylon subdirectory. Curiosity made me install it on my Palm, and found it to be the old Palm Mail program, version 4.5.

Having found the old Palm returned to me again, I quickly deleted VersaMail. I don't use my Palm for mail much, in fact I just want to be able to send the very occasional mail item from it -- messages I enter on the spur of the moment and may have forgotten about by the next HotSync, done over the weekend stuff, and so forth.

I don't want to get my inbox synced to the Palm at all. To do that, I've entered @false in the mail filter View or Formula panel, as you can see in Figure G.

FIGURE G


To prevent your Inbox from synchronizing, enter @false into the mail filter View or Formula panel. Roll over picture for a larger image.

When I sync, the outbox items on the Palm are sent, and a copy is also written into the sent folder in my Notes mail, and that's all.

iAnywhere specifically asked us to look at the attachments capability of mail with Pylon 5.2. So I installed Documents To Go from the Tungsten T's Software Essentials CD. This is the Palm OS application that reads and writes MS Office compatible files. I checked that Documents To Go itself worked ok.

I then configured mail in the Pylon configuration database. To do this I created a filter, illustrated in Figure H, which would copy unread mail to the Palm, and convert attachments on the way.

FIGURE H


Copy unread mail to your Palm and convert attachments. Roll over picture for a larger image.

When I performed a HotSync operation, new mail, with and without attachments on the Palm, appeared in Notes, with attachments where expected. Mail in Notes, with or without attachments, appeared on the Palm, and I could then read the attachments on the Palm.

Just be aware that this feature is limited to Word and Excel attachments, and that you need good eyesight to read the documents on a Palm -- the fonts get rendered awfully small. I did have an issue with Word documents that were actually created with Lotus WordPro, but that's not really a Pylon issue.

Conclusions
I hoped I was going to be impressed with Pylon Pro 5.2. And I think that overall I'm happy, but not ecstatic with it. I did have a few problems with installation and getting it all working, but I have to say that some of those problems were because I was trying to explore all of it for this review, and after all, you want your reviews to be picky, don't you?

I guess, too, that I might not have seen all the issues I did if all I'd done was the upgrade from my old version. Version 5.2 is not as completely documented as older versions, but what they have is good and useful. I dug out a copy of the Pylon User Guide for Version 3, and while that one was a bit over the top in going in to detail, when the chips are down, detail is detail and lack of detail is a problem.