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.

Have you ever been typing an email or text message and your Blackberry keeps trying to suggest words that don’t actually exist?  This is caused by nonsense words being found in your “custom dictionary”. Here’s how you keep this from happening.

When you type a message on yoru Blackberry Pearl, RIM’s SureType technology will try to “guess” (an educated guess) the word you want to type.  Sometimes you’ll type a word that isn’t in the default dictionary and your Blackberry will suggest one.  You can add your unique words when you do a spell check, by pressing the Blackberry button and “Add to dictionary.”

Unfortunately sometimes you can end up with words in your dictionary that aren’t actually words.  This can mess you up when your Blackberry suggests one of these “non-words.”  It’s takes a little more effort to get to the real word you were trying to spell.

To prevent this from happening, every couple of months, you should go into your custom dictionary and delete the words that aren’t real.  I just had to do that today when spelling the word “I’m” ended up being “Um”.  Not sure how “Um” got in the dictionary, but I had to do something cause it was driving me nuts.

How to clean up your custom dictionary:

1. Click on “Options”.  This is usually a wrench icon with most themese.
2. Scroll down and click on “Custom Dictionary”.
3. Work your way through the list of words and delete any you didn’t intent to have in the dictionary.
4. The list is in alphabetical order starting with capital letters first.

This will help to minimize your frustration with SureType.

I was going to show my wife how to transfer music from our PC to her new pink Blackberry Pearl, but she got a little impatient. I said “whatever you do, don’t mess with that ridiculous Roxio Media Manager. Instead I told her to check out the article I wrote about getting media onto a Blackberry Pearl.

Unfortunately, my wife didn’t follow direction or she got confused or something cause she ended up doing something a little different. This is a great discovery a lot of people may not know about (I didn’t).

Transfer Directly From iTunes to Your Blackberry Pearl

In the instruction I gave on getting around the Roxio Media Manager, I suggested opening up Windows Explorer and dragging files from the iTunes directory into the Blackberry Pearl “music” folder. Instead of doing this, my wife opened up TWO windows. One of them was Windows Explorer and the other was iTunes! She just started dragging files directly from her iTunes playlists straight onto her Blackberry Pearl.

I never realized you could do this. It’s so simple and it will even keep all of your Artist, Album and Genre information in tact. Of course, I tried to grab a playlist and move that over, but no luck. You’ll still have to create those on your Blackberry Pearl once you’ve uploaded your music, but it’s very simple. Maybe I’ll write a simple set of instructions for that in the future.

As for now, enjoy the drag and drop transfers from iTunes to your Blackberry Pearl. Oh, and now my wife gets to claim bragging rights for teaching her techno-geek husband how to do something on his Blackberry Pearl. Humbling to say the least, since she’s not really that technologically inclined.

* Added Bonus: Ok, now I’m starting to mess around with this and I really like what I’m seeing. I’m now able to use the awesome search and sort functions within iTunes to narrow down my songs to exactly what I want and then select them ALL and drag over to my Blackberry Pearl.

* Added Added Bonus: I think I’m going to create a “Blackberry Pearl” playlist in iTunes and then when I hear a song I want on my Blackberry, I can just drag it into that playlist. The next time I sync up my phone, I can just call up the “Blackberry Pearl” playlist and drag it’s content over to the Blackberry (remember, you have to drag the content of the playlist, not the playlist itself) and it will ask me if I want to replace the songs. Simply click “No to All” (I haven’t verified this is an option) and you’ll only move over the songs you didn’t have (kind of like a one-way sync).

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.