As great a mobile email device as the BlackBerry is, one of the things that bugs me the most is that it doesn’t handle HTML formatted messages very well. I am not quite sure why RIM still hasn’t come out with an HTML view option for email, but, seeing how they’ve only recently added spell check, am am not really surprised.
Fortunately there are third party applications popping up all over the place offering better email formatting than what you get on your BlackBerry out of the box. One such application that I’ve just become aware of is HTML Mail Viewer from Empower.
To make a long story short, HTML Email Viewer from Empower takes email messages coming into your BlackBerry that look like the one to the right, formats them, pretties them all up, and makes them look like the one down to the left.
I just installed HTML Mail Viewer on my Blackberry about 5 minutes ago so I cannot give you a full review other than telling you that it didn’t crash my BlackBerry, which, is always a plus. HTML Mail Viewer is in public beta, however, so you can download it OTA directly to your BlackBerry and take a look for yourself.
Be sure to come back here and leave your impressions in the comments. Just remember that HTML Mail Viewer is in beta so don’t be surprised if you find a bug or two.
Tested at least 10 times since downloading it at 10:45am today.
Looks like a great start, RIM should take notice and release similar feature. Works great!
Downloaded great. When you access an email it loads with the html and looks great. However when I move the curser down into the html area it reverts to the original look.
This app has some real potential. I noticed too that it reverts back to text when you scroll down and the whole message hasn’t been download and when you use the more command.
EMail Viewer is working great, however, I have two menus for everything, i.e., I see this in the Inbox menu…
Empower Options
Empower Options
Help
————————
Open
File
…
I see
Toggle HTML/Text
Toggle HTML/Text
Help
Find
Copy
… in the individual mail item menu
Everything else seems to work fine.
Great idea but I had my text set to a larger font size for my email etc. Email Viewer changed my font and text size to a much smaller size. Won’t work for me!
Just d/l’d the viewer. It works well for a beta. A couple of observations. 1. There is an empower options in the main level of your message mailbox. This is where you can change font size and background color. 2. If you have a long message and the message reverts back to text, you can click the wheel and press T to view again in html. 3. I wonder how this works and whether there are any security issues?
The way I understand it, there is the possibility of security issues and that is why RIM never implemented it in any of the ‘berries.
I cant get it work on my blackberry 8100 i change the options but wont change to html just shows text
Just a quick update – Empower HTML Mail Viewer is now in Version 2.0
The falling back to normal text view was there in early beta, and has been sorted. I would like to invite you all to check out Version 2.0
Thanks
Ani.
http://www.getempower.com
Downloaded, run, less than 10minute job. Fantastic results. The e-mail view changed completely. Now we I can enoy all my news letters and e-reviews. Its a great software. Great experience.
Thanks for the tips everyone!
It works really well on my BlackBerry 8820.
Only crashed once cause I was lookin’ through
the different backgrounds like a maniac… 🙂
Peace & Love
Leah
Ok, their definition of HTML email and mine are different. This will display HTML, but not the original HTML markup. It only uses the font setting you select in Empower options and ignores any HTML markup in the email (except for image tags). I don’t see color of font changes that are selected in the email, only the same font/color selected in Empower options. Ok it is a little better than the default RIM view, but only a little. . .
failed to install with error:
The following modules could not be loaded because their digital signatures were invalid.
EmpowerMailViewer.cod
EmpowerMailViewer-1.cod
i am on Verizon 8300 World Edition
Worked great for 2 days then started crashing my Blackberry 8330 OS 4.3.0.127 (Verizon). Uninstalled and no crashes now.
Blackberry 8830 had been crashing (spontaneous reboot) several times per day. Suspiciously this started soon after downloading Empower Pro and stopped the day I removed it. Unfortunately, I purchased it.
I like it, although I took it off of the default mail viewer, I’ll only toggle it on for emails actually in html. I just got the trial, is there a time period for it. As far as I can tell it just adds Trial product at the end of your emails, I can live with that!