mBoxMail - Hotmail with Push review

We review mBoxMail, an iPhone app that fetches your Hotmail messages and hand delivers them to your iPhone

Pretty much everyone has a Gmail account these days, and whether it’s a main email or not, it’s simply practical to be signed up with Google able to grab messages through the internet giant’s web gateway. The same used to be true (perhaps to a lesser degree) with Hotmail, being Microsoft’s key to unlocking Live Messenger.

Because of this, a lot of people do still have an active Hotmail account, and this application offers a neat and efficient way of connecting with your webmail while avoiding the advert-heavy website.

Perhaps its most prominent feature isn’t the push email, but its ability to effortlessly handle multiple Hotmail accounts. In a web browser, checking several different Hotmail inboxes is a chore, given that you’ve to sign in and out and in and out. The mBoxMail app allows you to configure as many Hotmail accounts as you like, and jump between them like they’re different folders on the same account.

The push email is still a benefit, of course, and as long as you’re on iPhone 3.0 firmware or above, notifications are delivered when new messages come along. It doesn’t seem to be a flawless push system, though much of the difficulties in having mail delivered directly, rather than fetching, is potentially at the Hotmail end of the avenue. The mBoxMail app therefore makes extra provision for failed pushes, but also offering an automatic background fetch every fifteen minutes. Not quite what it says on the tin, but it’s good to see a backup in place when pushing isn’t available.

Your messages are synchronised with the Hotmail folders, so any read, unread, important or other flags are replicated throughout the messaging system, adding something of an IMAP function to the email account. You can also move messages between folders directly from within the app, and even manage the folders within the email account in exactly the same way.

All your Live Messenger contacts are also brought into the mBoxMail application, as are attachments (even large ones), images and anything else accompanying a message. Searching through your folders is also simple and effective, and an embedded web browser makes it easy to follow any links sent to you by email.

The price makes mBoxMail a little prohibitive, but considering all the features included, this is still a great way to access Hotmail through an iPhone. If you’re already signed up and using Hotmail as your main point of email contact, give serious consideration to picking this app up. If Hotmail only gets moderate use, or you’re undecided on whether to choose it as your new webmail, £5.99 might push the whole thing about out of reasonable price range.

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