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Help Recommendations for email alerting

S

Shrim

Lurker
Hello,

I am trying to get some alerting set up, but I couldn't get it to work and I ended up having to install Touchdown trial to get what I needed.

I have a corporate exchange account on my HTC One X through AT&T. Once a month, I am on call for work and need to have an alert generated whenever a network alert is received. The way that I have done this in the past is create a contact for the email of the alerting software. Once that is created, set a custom notification tone for that contact.

In the Android OS, you can't do that for emails. So I ended up having to download Touchdown, and configure the alerting as described here: How to Configure Alerting on TouchDown for Android - FatMin

I also tried Mail Alert but since the OWA we use requires SSL, that was a no-go.

Any ideas? Is this the only option that I have? Many thanks for any help.
 
Hey Shrim, welcome to AF! :)

You can set specific notifications for different email contacts, but only if you use the gmail app. You'd also need to be have an autoforward setup so that the email alerts are forwarded to your gmail account. Is that an option?

It would be a slightly convoluted process, but it's the only way I can think it would work.
 
I thought about doing that, my only concern would be relying on an Outlook rule to forward, my Gmail getting to my phone, and the alerts working correctly. Being on call is unpleasant enough, if I miss an alert it gets decidedly more unpleasant.

I think I am going to try Touchdown for this week, uninstall, then try the Gmail app next on call cycle.

Thanks for the note.
 
Shrim said:
I thought about doing that, my only concern would be relying on an Outlook rule to forward, my Gmail getting to my phone, and the alerts working correctly. Being on call is unpleasant enough, if I miss an alert it get decidedly more unpleasant.
Click to expand...

Yeah, with the autoforward there are too many points of failure, but it's the only way I can think of getting it to work at the moment. Also, having been on call myself on occasion, I can totally sympathise with your last sentence.

Have you looked at any of the alternative mail apps? K9-Mail or MailDroid for example? I know K9 allows SSL, but not sure if you can set tones for individual contacts, it's been a while since I've used it (although when I did, I had no problems with it whatsoever).
 
Well, it looks like I might have to return the phone if I can't get this exactly right. Last night I missed two alerts because of an issue. It turns out that even if you get the Touchdown alert set up correctly, including Nag until acknowledge enabled, there are problems when multiple alerts come in.

When my alert email was coming in, I was getting a text alert at exactly the same time. This is by design as we want to be sure we still get alerts, even if we have email infrastructure issues. From what I can tell by testing today, the Nag alert was triggered, then immediately silenced because a text came in at the same time, triggering a different alert. SO... I slept though the alert because it did not ring long enough to wake me up.

Here are the options as I see them now, without returning the phone for another device:
1. Set my overall text alert to be a longer and lounder alert overnight, which may work but could have other consequences (night owls and early birds texting and waking me up).
2. Try to get the Gmail alerting for a label set up, have the alerts forwarded to my Gmail account and alerted there. The issue here is that the alert conflicts may still be occuring, and the alert tones for Gmail labels are shorter type alerts, not ring tones.
3. Try another product, such as K9. From what I have read and understand about the program, it will not do what I want but it might be worth a shot before dumping the handset.

Thoughts, opinions, or gaps in my logic?
 
If you place a folder on your SD Card called Notifications, you can put your own MP3's in there. That way, they'll appear in the drop down list for you to select for GMail/SMS notifications.

If you're getting SMS alerts too, I think SMS Enhancer allows you to set reminders if you miss the first. AFAIK, GoSMS & Handcent also allow this.

There are no gaps in your logic either.

I also think it would be a shame to give up the phone for this, but can understand if it doesn't do what you need.
 
It looks like I found the correct application to take care of all of my issues. SMS Pager works and does exactly what I need it to do. Instead of monitor on an email sender/contact, I set this app up to monitor my texts for a keyword (for example: MonitorServer). Whenever there is a text that contains that string, an alert is generated, and must be acknowledged or snoozed to turn off.

Here it is, and comes recommended for text alerting:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.realapps.smspager
 
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