Review: BerryMail for BlackBerry

I swear - if I get one more email about me being an heir to some overseas dead relative’s fortune, I’m going to scream. It seems as though unwanted email messages sometimes find a way to sneak through the guarded borders of your precious inbox. What’s worse is when that email is pushed to your BlackBerry. There you are in a meeting, a theatre, or having a romantic evening-You are already fighting your BlackBerry addiction; trying to stay in the moment. Then you feel the vibrating alert of a new message. INCOMING!! You succumb once again and sneak a peek. Then anger begins to fester, as you realize you risked getting caught, only to find an email promising to help you enlarge a specific part of the human anatomy (some of you even more upset at being bothered, as you don’t even have the part to begin with!).

BerryMail provides its services which include being another filter and managing the emails that see the light of day on your BlackBerry. It makes sense to manage filters directly on your BlackBerry – seeing how you are on the go anyway.

About BerryMail

BerryMail was developed by Bellshare GmbH, who just so happened to be the recipient of the 2010 CrackBerry App Award for App Developer of the Year. BellShare has an impressive list of BlackBerry apps, most of which are named Berry"Something” or Be"Something”; depending on which app store you visit. Their portfolio includes; Berry Weather, BerryBuzz and SmartAlerts. The current version of BerryMail is 1.0.15 and has a file size of 109 KB.

Don’t let the home screen icon fool you- in order to access BerryMail, you have to visit your Options menu. While accessing messages, you can also select Add BerryMail Rule from the menu. BerryMail helps you manage which emails you are allowing yourself to receive and what to do with them. By accessing BerryMail through the Options menu, you can see a list of rules that you have set up – and the option to create another. For incoming email, you can instruct BerryMail to look for the following criteria:

• Email addresses, or partial addresses that match; can choose to look for a match in all address fields or specifically in the To, From or CC field
• Keywords in the subject and/or message
• Which of your email accounts to look at
• Email with and/or without attachments

From there, you can choose BerryMail to perform the following actions:

• Mark the message as opened
• Automatically delete the message
• Disable the attention grabbing LED flash
• Set the message priority to High or Low

To make scrolling through your rules easier, each rule is assigned a name of your choice. Adding a rule from your Messages is quite similar. When selecting Add BerryMail Rule, a popup will ask you if you want to base the rule on the sender and/or the subject. After that, the rule set up is identical to the method previously mentioned. When setting the rule, it doesn’t matter if the message is currently being viewed or not.

The Rule list displays active rules, their names and function (Delete Message, etc). To the left of each rule entry is an envelope and number. This is the message counter, indicating how many emails have been managed by each filter. BerryMail smoothly integrates into daily message usage. One would assume that an application like BerryMail should be included in the BlackBerry OS, as it feels like a native option to have in the menu. BerryMail doesn’t conflict with email popup alert applications; a deleted message will never generate a popup. I did find, however, that you will still receive other types of notifications. My BlackBerry would still vibrate, alerting me of an incoming message. The home screen indicator would still, very briefly, show a new message. BerryMail then goes to work and deletes the message. I would prefer to never be notified at all, but for that, you would have to look at your email account options.

Conclusion

While not completely eliminating distractions, BerryMail does make sure unwanted emails won’t plague you any further. Rules are easily created and managed; regardless if you are creating them from the message folder or the options menu. Soon, you can get back to what you are supposed to be doing and forget about reading up on the great deals you can get on watches. BerryMail is currently on sale for $0.99 at the CrackBerry App Store. To try before you buy, they offer a 3 day trial period. They also offer a free version, with limited functionality, which can be found at BlackBerry App World.

Pros

• Manage mail from within the message folder
• Easily create and manage rules
• Doesn’t interfere with popup apps

Cons

• Still (briefly) notified of incoming messages

More Info

• More information and download BerryMail for BlackBerry >>