Nokia has no excuse for poorly documenting a great idea. Very often their products and services seem lackadaisical. The company often lacks enthusiasm and focus – a trend which if continues can lead the company to oblivion.

I love this on my e72, but one serious problem. THIS WILL ONLY WORK ON ONE ACCESS POINT! No matter what your settings are. I have everything set to WiFi default and when I leave my WiFi network it switched to packet data. Except for Messaging that has separate data settings and you can only pick one way, either WiFi or 3g…

This is long but there is a lot to say because there’s a lot wrong here.
The way Messenger is marketed and [not] supported breeds confusion. Nokia Messenger appears to be a dual-function mail client that can either be a ‘plain vanilla’ mail client or a Bilberry clone that provides ‘push mail’.

To avoid adding to the confusion; we are referring to the mail clients often branded as Nokia Messenger that are installed on Nokia smart and semi-smart phones, the Nokia Messaging website and in particular the bit of Messaging that pushes e-mail to users’ phones.
Consumers rarely know which one is installed on their phone.
Responsibility for that lies with Nokia Messaging.

Part one
mail uncertainty = brand damage

Consumers have no idea what version of mail they get with their new Nokia phone. Push e-mail is very important to those who got used to it. Finding out if a new Nokia phone contains cut-down e-mail, ‘trial’ e-mail or full-fat e-mail is pre-sale guesswork and end-user responsibility after sale. This is disaffecting. Every time you get a Nokia the only way to find out if it ‘comes with mail’ is by setting it up and then watching it fail. There is no coherence or handover simplicity between generations of Nokia phones. User feedback shows that Messenger is overwhelmingly problematic. Countless disappointed and frustrated consumers are vainly trying to combat product disorder, product uncertainty, provision confusion only to get beaten up with a server kill [more on that later].
RIM tarnished its reputation when started supplying its products without their namesake feature and very soon had to find other ways to flood the market with its wares. Is there some kind of compulsion to replicate competitors’ mistakes?
We think that the deliberately confusing provision of mail in Nokia phones is absurd and alienating, sneaky and given that it has gone on for five years, commercially suicidal. It is an invitation for regulatory investigation because we think it breaches some EU consumer protection legislation.
Speculation [this is skippable]:
If I understand it correctly [and that's a big if] the magic plan in 2004 was that a few semi/smart phones [we're not told which ones] got full-fat mail, a random selection [again no idea which] got a version requiring activation, subject of course, to a cash gouge and the rest got zip. It seems that most fall into the cash-gouge category on the 2003 observation that collecting a cut of network income in 2010 will be a licence to print money. Problem is: Never happened. Not happening. Not going to happen. In all the time we’ve used the misleadingly labelled ‘trial’ version we’ve only ever been invited to ‘upgrade’ once, sometime in 2006 when this wheeze was reasonably fresh.
Given Nokia’s approach to phone mapping one begins to wonder why so much entrenched commitment to consumer confusion, alienation and deception? It’s almost a textbook instance of deliberate end-user loyalty assassination and brand destruction. Does the Messaging Product commissariat have so much autonomy that it can keep doing this for five+ years? Why? How many telco Messaging contracts has it sold in that period? We think that the simplest and most economical solution would be to set full-fat Messenger free like mapping. Doing that might migitate the damage it inflicts, which is something that can’t be said about mapping anyway since paid mapping didn’t do any brand damage.
Nokia ‘teams’ somewhere (presumably including the Messaging sparks) are betting Nokia’s public reputation, end-user adoption and brand value against imbecility wrapped in a seven-year old copy of a hazy beriberry knock-off which after five years has not even reached break even point. We’re not sure how this ‘thought’ could have survived this long especially in view of the intangible damage it is wreaking. If we were Nokia we would be wondering how many people inside Nokia Messaging were really working for them.

Part two.
Server commands that kill configurations and erase user files without warning are very naughty and we are complaining about them.
We think Nokia Messaging deliberately disables phone functionality.

We think Nokia Messenger tampers with users’ phones. Without warning a Nokia Messaging server can send a command to erase mail configurations and delete users’ own files. Not every mail message is necessarily replicated on a user’s mail server. It follows that Nokia is responsible for irretrievably deleting users files and messages. It’s happened to our phones.

Part three
A couple of our own recent real-world examples:

An associate ran an E90 communicator which, we believe, is licensed for full messenger functionality for the life of the handset [not user, contract, telco etc.]. It has ‘the lot’. It was recently replaced by an E72, which also has full-fat mail, we think. We reused the E90, replaced its SIM and erased all mail settings [or so we thought]. At some point during this process Nokia sent an e-mail stating that it had cancelled Messaging because the handset had new ownership [which was incorrect anyway, merely a new user]. Both handsets were fully licensed for their respective lifetimes and the server identifies handsets during client-server communication. Push mail on both phones went dead. The Messenger website provides no means of contacting Nokia nor does it offer any option to erase or reset user data or terminate, reset or restart the service. In fact we found no option on the website to even change a handset. We fail to see why Nokia disabled everything on both handsets without at least providing a means of contact or notice. We fail to understand its unilateral finality on many levels including regulatory ones. It’s our mail, man!
We think this is absurd and alienating, sneaky and commercially suicidal.
We also think this contravenes the licence and that the confluence of phone, website and server individually and together breach EU data regulations.
On the E90 Messenger stores some personal details even after it has been decommissioned [files & accounts removed and application uninstalled]. When we tried to create a new Messenger set-up we kept being redirected to the previous user’s now-dead Messenger set-up. We have no way to use licensed functionality. It is impossible to revise or rewrite this user data – unless I guess, the phone is completely reset. If that’s so we would ask why we should be forced to do this, where does it say that we must reset a customised handset in order to restore e-mail functionality when the license applies to the handset, not the user. If the first user decommissions Nokia Messenger then the succeeding user should be able to use full-fat Messenger, because no user files related to Messaging exist. Right? Messenger refuses to function because it stores user data and makes it unavailable for user revision or erasure.

In effect Nokia has bricked our E90 because we think, it links personal data to handset and telco, which by our recollection is not in the terms and conditions.
We think this is absurd and alienating, sneaky and commercially suicidal.
We also think this is in breach of numerous EU regulations.

Second recent experience.
About a year ago I set up a 5230 as a second phone. A Nokia 5230 does not ‘come with mail’ so Messenger was in so-called ‘trial’ mode. Ironically perhaps, it is actually on a full Bilberry contract, working extremely well as a replacement. Messenger could be as good as competing services. Two months ago I replaced my primary handset with a Nokia N900 which ‘comes with mail’. I set up mail on the N900 without using its Messenger option [because, like millions of other Nokia users, I had no idea it existed]. At that point the phones worked like this: The 5230 acted as a mail notifier and I think, the N900 collected mail shortly after possibly via IMAP. Several mail accounts were common to both handsets. I can’t check the original N900 mail configuration because when I discovered that the N900 ‘came with mail’ I reconfigured the handset to use it. My mistake.
There is no push mail on the N900 now. It’s now scheduled. Trying to set up push mail on the handset resulted in a whole sequence of failures: Password failures, no mail notification and so on. To this day Messenger does not work. It’s my guess that Nokia servers have connected mail accounts, IMEI numbers and unrelated personal data. Again we do not intend to factory reset this phone, not least because comprehensive backup options do not exist. Once more we returned to the website to no avail. Nothing on it permits access to service, data reset or full account termination.
We think this is absurd and alienating, sneaky and commercially suicidal.
We also think this is in breach of numerous EU regulations.

Part three
things take a sinister turn
Since mail on the N900 failed I resorted to the secondary phone, the 5230. What happened next was astonishing. During my struggles with the N900 Nokia attacked the 5230. By the time I reverted to the 5230 every mail account, every setting, every message, had been wiped including messages that had not been replicated on the IMAP server. Everything was wiped. Starting Nokia Messenger simply brought up the setup wizard. I could not use my mail accounts [update: We tried a week or so later and managed to use push mail on some of the original mail accounts without of course, any guarantee that Nokia won't wipe the phone again]
Our view: Regardless of trial status Nokia must not delete my files on my handset without giving me a chance to move them to safety.
This is breathtakingly abusive and begs regulatory investigation.
We think this is also absurd and alienating, sneaky and commercially suicidal.
We think this activity breaches numerous EU regulations.

This is replicable: Another 5230 was also wiped with exactly the same results – no files & no mail.

We’ve used push Nokia Mail/Messaging on about ten Nokia handsets. In the last year alone Nokia Messaging has wiped mail settings on three phones, wiped user files on two and bricked two applications. Extrapolating suggests that Nokia Messaging will have attacked millions of handsets in the same way as well as comprehensively assassinating the Nokia brand.

In our estimation freeing Nokia Messenger would cost far less than the €5.7+ billion it cost to set mapping free. Tamper proof push mail at no upfront consumer cost ought be the price Nokia pays to recover and compete.

We’re not really expecting any response from Nokia Messaging ‘team’ any more. We’ve tried. Doubtless these people are busy doing something for someone somewhere. Instead this is a warning to others and a public begging letter for some EU regulator to have a look.

I have already switched to nokia after sooo many years on different windows mobile phones. I\’d better not read this article once more. Hope it isn\’t my case. Otherwise I\’ ll dump nokia for several years to come.
Regards,