It all started off great.  I was getting email on my Blackberry Pearl from about 4 different email accounts and managing to stay on top of it all.  Like you, I would respond to the ones that needed an immediate response and delete the ones that didn’t, knowing I could handle it once I got back to my computer.  Then it happened…

SPAM!

My work email is all over the company website and the spam robots found it.  I started getting over 100 spam emails a day.  That wouldn’t be bad if I just accessed my email from work, but I don’t.  All of these emails were going to my Blackberry.  I would hear the distinct tone of another email coming in, look at my phone and see an offer to increase the size of .. well, you know what I mean.  I was getting more spam than I was legitimate email.

My company wasn’t doing anything to filter the email on the server side, so I saw stuck getting all of these emails and feeling helpless.  I couldn’t just remove my work email from the phone, since they were giving me a monthly phone allowance.  Hard to justify that.  So, I would look at the emails and delete.  Look and delete.  Look and delete.  All day long.

Server Side Filtering

Then I remember how I was able to filter my email so I wouldn’t get a copy of every message I sent out through Gmail (I’ll post instructions for this soon).  It was in the BIS site but I hadn’t been there in a LONG time.  If you’re using your Blacberry Pearl with a regular email service (not an Enterprise server) you’re probably using a BIS (Blackberry Internet Service).  If you’re using Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo mail, there’s no doubt this is what you’re using.  Here’s a link to the main BIS sites (open them in a seperate tab or window) so you can follow along:

• Verizon BIS
• AT&T BIS
• Sprint BIS
• T-Mobile BIS
• Rogers BIS

If your wireless provider isn’t listed, try doing a Google search for your wireless carriers name and BIS.  That will usually bring it up for you.  If all else failes, give your customer service a call and they can point you in the right direction.

If you’re getting email on your Blackberry Pearl, you should already have a login for your BIS. If you don’t know this, you’ll have to get help from your wireless carrier.  Once you’re logged in, we can get started filtering your email so you only get the important items you need to have when you’re on the go.

Creating Your Filters

The first filter I created was to tell the BIS that I only wanted emails sent from people with the same domain name as mine.  This would most likely be your company name.  For example only get emails from other people with @blackberry-pearl.net in their address.  I did learn it’s a LOT easier to tell your Blackberry what you WANT than what you DON’T want. Here’s how you do that.

You email account or accounts should be listed on the screen once you log in.  On the right side of the screen, there will be an icon like this under the heading “Filters”.  Click the one that corresponds to the appropriate email account.

1. Now you’ll want to “Add Filter” and give it a name.
2. In the section “Apply filter when:” select “From:” field
3. Under “contains” put @yourcompanyaddress.com
4. Then click on “Forward message to device.”

Next I created a rule to forward email addresses that are not part of my company email, but I still want to get on my Blackberry, such as my wife.  I did that by repeating the above process and including the full email address in the “contains” section.  You can put more than one email address in there if you seperate them with a semi-colon.

Once you’re done with this filter, you’ll be back at the front page with a list of your filters.  You’ll notice part way down, there’s a choice for handling items not listed in your filters. Make sure you click “do NOT forward messages to device.”

That’s it.  Now you’ve got it done.  If you find you’re not getting some emails that you need, simply add their name to your safe list on the BIS and they’ll start to come through.  Truth is, most of these people don’t really need an instant response and it frees you up to enjoy your “out of office” time a little more as well.

To keep your Blackberry Pearl running at the peak of it’s capabilities, you’re going to want to make sure you’re not wasting valuable memory on stuff you don’t need. You’d be surprised at what hogs up the memory. We’ll look at a few of the main items and how to delete or manage them.

First of all, how much memory do you have available? It’s very easy to find this out. Here’s how:

1. Click on the options icon (probably looks like a wrench).
2. Scroll to “status” and click
3. “File Total” is the total amount of memory available on your device.
4. “File Free” is the amount of memory free at this time.

Ok, so now that you know how much you have to work with, let’s see how big we can make that “File Free” number.

Clean out your inbox. I explain how to do this in another post, so I won’t go into the details here.

Content Compression

One of the quickest and easiest steps you can take to free up valuable memory on your Blackberry Pearl is to enable “Content Compression”. I don’t know exactly how much room you’ll gain from this, because I’ve always used it on my Pearl. If you’re isn’t already enabled, here’s how you do it:

1. Start on your main screen (the one with all the icons).
2. Scroll to and click on “options” (should look like a wrench).
3. Scroll to and click on “Security Options“
4. Scroll to and click on “General Settings“
5. Scroll down to “Content Compression“
6. If it doesn’t say “Enabled” click on it and select it now.
7. Press the Blackberry Button (7 dots left of the pearl)
8. Scroll down and select “Save“

That’s it. You’ve just enabled Content Compression. This will reduce the amount of memory used for all content, including picures, videos, music, calendar information and messages.

If yours wasn’t enabled before leave a comment to let me know how much memory you gained using this feature.

Delete Applications You Don’t Use

If you never play BrickBreaker, don’t let it hog up all the memory on your Blackberry Pearl. You might be surprised at how many programs are hanging out on your Pearl. Here’s how you find them and delete the ones you don’t want or need.

1. Go to your main home screen
2. Scroll to and click on “options” (looks like a wrench)
3. Scroll to and click on “Advanced Options“
4. Scroll to and click on “Applications“
5. Wait for your Pearl to build the list of applications
6. Scroll through and find any applications you don’t want, need or use
7. With that application selected, press the “Blackberry (menu) button“
8. Scroll down to “Delete” and press the pearl button

Note: Some applications will require you to restart your Blackberry Pearl before they’re completely removed.

There are a number of other tricks you can use to free up memory on your Pearl. I’ll explore some of those in a future post. Until then, take some time to impliment what we’ve gone over here. It will pay off in having a faster running Blackberry Pearl.

It’s tempting to simply ignore your inbox and let the messages pile up. It’s really important you don’t do this. If you’ve already read something, taken action on it by replying or putting it on your calendar, and have no need for a message on your Blackberry Pearl, DELETE IT.

As you let your messages pile up on your Blackberry Pearl, you’re taking up valuable memory space. To give you an example. Right now I have messages on my phone that date back to Sunday. I don’t know how many messages, but I’d guess it’s about 50 or 60. I currently have 3.2 MB of memory available. I’ve just deleted all of my message (more on how to do this quickly in a moment) and I now have 3.3 MB available. One quick action and I’ve freed up a bit of space. It’s not a ton, but it all adds up.

Here are a few options for managing and deleting your messages.

First step: Save what you need. Go through your list of messages and “save” the ones you think you might need. This is very simple.

Using your pearl button scroll down to the message you want to save, click on the ‘blackberry button’ (that’s the one with the 7 dots on it, just left of the pearl button). Scroll down to save and click on it.

Now it will be kept in a special “saved messages” folder. It won’t get deleted when you bulk delete your messages in your inbox (more on how to do that in a moment).

There are a number of options for deleting messages.

Delete only one TYPE of message. If you want to just delete your SMS messages in your out box, or if you want to only delete your MMS (pictures, video, sound) messages, you can do just that. Here’s what you do:

From your home screen, click on messages. Click on the “Blackberry Button” (remember that’s the one with the 7 little dots) and scroll down to “View Folder”. Select the appropriate folder and click your pearl button. At this point you can do one of several options. If you want to just delete one message at time, you can scroll to the message, press the Blackberry button and select “delete”. That can take a long time, so there are some other options.

Select and delete a group.

• Start at the top message of a group you want to delete.
• Press and HOLD the “shift” button.
• Use your pearl button to scroll down to the last message in the group.
• Release the shift button.
• Press the “Blackberry button”
• Select delete.
• That entire block of messages will be gone.

Delete all messages prior to a specific date

• Scroll to the bar at the top of each date (or the top of the entire list).
• Press the Blackberry button
• Select “delete prior”.
• All of the message from that date backwards will be deleted.

If you click the bar at the very top of the list of messages, select “delete prior”, you’ll delete ALL of your messages. Be careful with this option, you could end up deleting too many messages.

Note: If you want to delete your outgoing messages (SMS or MMS), you’ll need to go into that specific outbox under (View Folder) and delete those separately. You can use the same select and delete techniques as noted above.

That’s it. You’ve now cleaned up your messages and helped to free up extra memory on your Blackberry Pearl. There are several other ways to free up even more space on your Blackberry Pearl, but that’s a great start.

I’m always giving my thumb a major workout as I try to scroll through pages and pages of emails using the scroll ball on my Blackberry Pearl. I desperately needed a way to go from 2/3 of the way down my list of messages to the very top. I knew there was a way, I didn’t know it.

Here’s some keyboard shortcuts I found. I’d love to know of any others you may have.

PRESS 1 – Go to the top of your list of messages

PRESS 7 – Go to the bottom of your list of messages

PRESS 2 – Move up one message at a time.

PRESS 8 – Move down one message at a time.

PRESS 3 – Move up one day at a time.

PRESS 9 – Move down one day at a time.

PRESS 0 – Page down

PRESS 5 – Start a new blank message

PRESS * SYM – Go to your unread messages