Some Domino and IMAP tips for Android / HTC Desire HD

I just managed to get my HTC Desire HD Android Device to retrieve email from a Lotus Domino server using the IMAP protocol. It was not without some headaches, so I would like to share some tips on what I did to get it working.

Of course IMAP has to be loaded as a service on the Domino server. Look in the Administrator for help on that.

You should set the "Prefers MIME" flag on the Person Document of the user.

Then you have to make sure that the mail database of the user is flagged for IMAP use. You can look this up in the Administrator help.
load convert -e mail/database.nsf

You may want to also do
load convert -h mail/database.nsf
I believe that this will make IMAP communication faster when the device talks to the server and the server needs to find the documents that it should forward to the device.

Even though I had done all this, I still did not get any email on my Android device. I could see the folders that are in the mail file - in the email client on the device. But no email.

What did get it working was to fiddle with a setting in the mail client. And this is the standard email client available on a HTC Desire HD. The menu names may be slightly different as I did this on a device configured for Danish.
I clicked menu->More->Preferences->Send and Receive
Here I can configure things like message size and how often the client should check for new mail.
I clicked Download options. And here I can configure how old or how many emails it should retrieve.
By default it was set to 7 days I believe.
I changed this setting to "All".
Now it is configured to retrieve all messages.

Doing that and then forcing the client to do an update, I finally saw all the email in my Inbox.

I am pretty sure that my problem was a date format issue. The client asked the Domino server for something like "between December 6th and December 13th" but it probably had the date format wrong, using mm-dd-yyyy while the server is configured for dd-mm-yyyy.

My fix - retrieving "All" - is probably not a very good idea for a user who does not file read emails away from his Inbox
I am following the Getting Things Done way of working, so it works for me.