Embarrassingly, I was in the middle of writing this post about how impossible it is to send/receive email on the phone, and was going through the process which had failed half a dozen times before so I could write it up, when suddenly it worked.

I will now change this post to state what I did, for the record. I don't remember if I changed anything to make it finally work, but perhaps my mail provider didn't like my desktop machine and my phone hammering it with POP3 requests. On the other hand, I haven't sent any emails all day, and SMTP suddenly started working too.

Note, this is only for POP3, whereas IMAP is the dream. If I get that working I'll write more. I had tried 2 different IMAP servers and two POP servers (using domain names and IP addresses) and I always got stuck at "Connecting to <server_name>..." where it stayed until I pressed cancel. The mail provider I finally got it working with is my broadband ISP.

So, let's go over everything I did to get this to work. You make sure you can access the web with the phone's browser. You create a new mailbox on the phone with the IP of your email servers (SMTP for send, POP3 for receive). You put your username and password in. You select the default port and authentication on. (You tell it to use "O2 Internet"). You enable GPRS. You write an email. You click Send or Send/Rec.

Good luck guys.