I hate it when things don’t work. It just drives me nuts when I know something should work, and it doesn’t, either because of some incompatibility beyond my control, or because of some human error typically caused by poor documentation or instruction. So needless to say, when I finally consolidated some of my 10 or so email addresses last week, and set them all to route through my Gmail, I was devastated to learn that my Treo 600, in it’s stock form, would not handle both the sending and receiving of Gmail. It would receive my Gmail without issue, but sending threw me all sorts of errors. Very frustrating.

I scoured the net and the options seemed scarce. I was frustrated, and thought that there is NO WAY I am the only person who has run into this same problem with this same combination of hardware and software. Had everyone else just given up? After some searching and checking out some news groups and forums, I began to see a common name. Snappermail. Wary of throwing random things on my Treo, I like to see a piece of software endorsed in several semi-reputable places before going for the download. At this point I felt ok, and decided to give it a whirl. I downloaded and installed Snappermail’s free trial, and it threw errors at every turn…on send, on receive, on start up. I mean, it seemed to get a lot of cred on the Treo forums, but the short time I spent on the trial did not exactly inspire confidence. It promised that although the “Premier Edition” was needed for some features, that they were all present in the free trial. I was not feeling Snappermail, and removed it within an hour of first installing it.

Enter Versamail. Sometimes you reach a point where you have come so far in a journey (consolidating your email for instance), that you aren’t going to let a downed bridge at the last turn, keep you from reaching your destination. Sometimes you are so desperate to finish the journey, you will even pay for software to solve a problem that you can reasonably say, should not exist in the first place. The good news is that Versamail was the answer. The bad news is that it cost me $30.

Was it worth it? I would have to say yes. Although it pained me to pay $30 to make two common items (A Treo and Gmail) work together, it was worth it. The aim of the email consolidation and of having the Treo, is to make my life easier. So in the end, this will make my life easier by at least $30 worth (and I think it will), I feel ok about it.

Knowing that there are many others out there that are likely going to scour Google as I did, searching for “sending mail on Treo 600″, I figured I would post the simple links and the whatididtomakeitwork’s, so that hopefully someone else can do this with a little more ease than I did.

Step 1 - Download VersaMail here ($29.99)

Step 2 - Install VersaMail

Step 3 - HotSync Your Treo

Step 4- Configure (this is the important part, my white whale)

Step 5 - Email your balls off.

Happy emailing and good luck making Gmail play nice with your Treo 600. I hope this info helps someone get to the bottom of this faster than I did.