How is WirelessMail better than using an R6 Mail Rule to 'send a copy to' my wireless device?

There are several advantages of WirelessMail over a Notes 6.x Mail Rule. The following features are built into WirelessMail, but are not available with a Mail Rule:

  • Attachment filtering by size or file type. WirelessMail optionally lets you receive only the attachment types and sizes supported by your data service and device so you don't waste bandwidth and mailbox space pulling down attachments that you cannot read. Mail rules will forward all attachments, which can quickly reach the limit of a forwarding destination mailbox (e.g., 10MB on a Blackberry Web Client mailbox).
  • Intelligent spam filtering and white listing filters, with the ability to add Inbox addresses to your filter rules with one click, give you more effective streamlining of which emails get sent to your wireless device. You can even automatically forward any message that is from an address to which you have sent mail.
  • On devices with 'Fixed Auto-BCC', permanent copies of emails sent from the wireless device are retained in your Sent view in Notes (not in your Inbox), as if you had sent them from Notes. This gives you a permanent record of everything you've sent from the wireless device. Without WirelessMail, BCC'd copies back to Notes end up in the Inbox, where you have to run a custom agent on them to have them show up in your Sent view.
  • Remote control full text searching of your entire mailfile from the wireless device via subject line syntax mailed back to Notes. Other remote control features include polling your calendar between any two dates, disabling and enabling forwarding, adding or removing a forwarding address, querying anyone's email address, and remotely controlling your settings.
  • Suppression of forwarding during certain hours when you know you'll be at your PC, or even when your Notes mailbox is open. This prevents you from getting bothered with emails on your wireless device when you'd rather read them on your PC.
  • Emails that are forwarded to your wireless device are marked with an antenna icon, so you can quickly tell which ones were sent to the wireless device.
  • For use with cell phones and devices that support only limited message lengths, WirelessMail can abbreviate words, clip important text, and split long messages into multiple smaller ones. It can even RemoveSpacesAndCapitalizeTheFirstLetterOfEachWord in order to increase useful text length by 20%. Emails always appear to come from the original sender, not the Domino server. Mail Rules use the server name in the Sender field of your wireless device, which on some -- but not all -- wireless devices causes the user to have to open the email to see who it is from. WirelessMail preserves the Sender, From, and ReplyTo exactly as the message was received.
  • WirelessMail tracks statistics for number of messages forwarded (and filtered) by day, week, month, year, and history, as well as between any two dates you specify. For data services that charge you per message, this lets you audit your wireless fees on your service bills.

Also, note that Mail Rules do not work if you have a 'Before new mail arrives' agent running (such as several popular spam filtering tools) or if your organization has disabled Mail Rules on the server for performance reasons.