For you or your staff, however, travel might be a regular part of your normal business day. Even if you're not a business traveler, perhaps you have a long commute by train or as a carpool passenger. That time could be spent getting through some of your backlog of email.

Fortunately, Palm, Inc. and its partners offer a number of solutions for secure, mobile access to corporate email. No matter which email or groupware application you use, it's probably supported. There are solutions for Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, Lotus Notes and Domino, and Novell GroupWise, as well as IMAP4 (Internet Message Access Protocol 4) and POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3) solutions.

I've looked into the various email solutions available, and in the next few pages, I'll share with you some of the interesting options I discovered.

Sending and receiving desktop email
All Palm devices come with a built-in Palm Mail application that you can synchronize with your own desktop email clients. Of course, you might not want all your mail to download to your Palm device, as it could eat up a lot of memory. Fortunately, there are settings within the application that let you decide what email you want to receive, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

You can decide what email you want to receive.

Another option might be to create a new email account that you only give out to those individuals whom you want to send you email on your Palm device. This might help to reduce the amount of spam and other clutter. There's also an option to truncate messages to a particular number of characters, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B

You can truncate messages that come into your Palm Mail application.

Besides Palm Mail, there are other solutions you might want to consider.

Palm, Inc.'s MultiMail Conduit
Palm's own MultiMail Conduit (at http://www.palm.com/software/multimail/) allows you to synchronize MultiMail Pro email with the email on your Windows desktop. It's been updated to support email attachment conversions, meaning your desktop attachments are converted to Palm viewable attachments. This works for most file types, including Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Adobe Acrobat.

DataViz Mail
DataViz, the creators of Documents To Go (at http://www.dataviz.com), have a product called DataViz Mail designed to allow you to synchronize with desktop email clients like Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, while also retaining your attachments. DataViz Mail comes as an added bonus for purchasers of Documents To Go, which enables you to create, view, and edit Word, Excel, and other files on your Palm device.