mBox Mail 2.0 review

If you’ve ever tried to read and use your Hotmail email using Apple?€s preinstalled iPhone Safari browser you’ll know that it’s a waste of time because the browser can’t cope with Microsoft’s email layout.

Enter mBox Mail 2.0 from mFluent, a handy way to keep your Hotmail on your mobile.

mBox Mail is a fast, fully-featured Hotmail client for the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch. It offers full access and control of Windows Live Hotmail, including the ability to send, receive and of course write emails.

The application behaves like the built-in Mail application on the iPhone – only it speaks the Windows Live Hotmail protocol rather than POP3 as Mail does.

Recently mBox has been given a makeover with a host of new features that the community have demanded since the first mBox came out last year. New updates include features like multiple account support, email search, Windows Live Contact access, custom folder management and sync, landscape view and a new fresh look.

One cool feature is the ability to customise your signature on your iPhone for outgoing messages, and you can edit your sent messages folder, plus keep emails for review or delete them as wanted.

You can also access all of your Windows Live Contacts and synched emails even when you have no network access.

mBox can be used with 3G or over Wi-Fi giving you access to your email when you are out and about.

One downside for the app is the lack of push notifications due to the drain on the iPhone battery and Apple support – after all, you have only been able to access any type of push email on the iPhone since Apple’s own MobileMe service was launched last year.

To access your emails, you have to launch the mBox application and then request it to fetch your emails for you. If you’re eager enough, you can of course keep requesting the app to download your new emails, but this will waste time and battery life.

Another quirk is that you can’t download any email that’s more than 1MB and although this seems large, it does mean that any email with a photo, video or music file as an attachment can’t be viewed. For this, you’re directed to the Windows Live website where you’re forced to struggle with the Safari interface to view the email.

For £2.99, we think this app is a real steal. If you use Hotmail as your main email service which many iPhone users do – this is must have app.