As I mentioned on Monday, Beth Seliga, a freelance photographer who covers pro cycling, asked me which email client to use on her new palmOne Treo 650.

I had strong opinions ready when she asked this question, so I'm going to repeat them and enhance them with links for the benefit of everyone who reads Operation Gadget. In an attempt to keep it simple, I'm breaking the results down into two categories: what may work and what probably won't work:

• What May Work

  • Chatter Email: This is the email client that Kathleen and I both use. I chose Chatter Email because of:

    1. the Strong IMAP Support: I decided to standardize on IMAP-enabled mailboxes so that what we saw on the desktop we would also see on the Treos.
    2. my Selection of the Unlimited Data Plan: I was willing to pay $39.99 per month for unlimited data service for our two Treos.

    If you do not choose to go on an unlimited data plan with your Treo, that doesn't mean that Chatter Email would be a bad solution for you. However, you should realize that using the push email capability may cause you exceed your bucket of wireless data kilobytes.

  • SnapperMail: This email client appears to be aimed at the POP3 email users of the world, rather than IMAP users like me. If you use the Post Office Protocol for email, I would definitely give SnapperMail a try. I think it's clearly more stable than VersaMail.
    

• What Probably Won't Work
  
  
  
  • VersaMail: I realize that this is the email client that most Treo 650 users try first, mainly because palmOne installs it and puts part of it in ROM. There are a couple of issues with this program that are show stoppers for me:
    
    
    
    1. Instability: Versamail just crashes too often. It seems like Versamail crashes on people whenever they try to show me their Treos running it. Most of the time the demonstration starts like this: "Why does this program crash so often? Oh darn...."
       

    2. Faux IMAP Support: The folks at palmOne don't seem to understand the design philosophy behind IMAP-- specifically, that IMAP users are supposed to keep their email permanently on the mail server. If you need clarification on this point, refer to In Order to Understand Wireless Email, First Understand the Purposes of the Protocols.

       When you use Versamail to manage your IMAP mailbox, it loads copies of part of each email on to your Treo and keeps them there-- just like the way it handles email messages under POP3. The only thing is it doesn't discard those messages when you finish looking at each message. It also doesn't discard those messages if you choose to constrain the number of messages in your Inbox to those messages that arrived in the last "n" days.
       

    
    
  
  

Those are my opinions on the three biggest email clients for the Treo 600 and 650. I've had my Treo 650 for 11 weeks now and taken it on a two week business trip, so I think I can be reasonably confident that I'm not missing anything in the basic functionality of these three programs. However, if I receive new information, find out something new, or a serious competitor materializes to these three, I'll mention it here.

I'm intentionally leaving out clients that are specific to one mobile phone carrier. I know that Cingular has one. I don't think it is worth using because the number of users from whom you can learn will be so much smaller than if you chose a mainstream Treo email client.

If you have any alternatives that I haven't mentioned, feel free to post a comment and I will take a look at it.