Bring Email to the Big Screen with Media Center Mail
by Michael Healy @ 9:00 am on June 25th, 2009 in extenders, plugins with 20 Comments
Looking for a way to bring your GMail to your 10-foot interface? We may have just the thing for you. If you’ve been looking for a way to separate yourself from your desktop but can’t live without immediate access to your email it might be time to give Media Center Mail a try.
Officially known as Vista Media Center Mail, a recent update has made this useful little Media Center plugin Windows 7 compatible. Created by and available for download from OABSoftware getting started with the plugin is a snap.
Once you’ve downloaded and installed the plugin you’ll need to open up the configuration software from the programs menu. The first thing you’ll need to do is setup the basic configuration. Tell the program how often you’d like it to check for new mail and what sound, if any, you’d like played when new mail arrives.
New create your first user by pressing the Add new user (
) icon in the toolbar. Select the user’s name in the tree on the left to assign a display name and optional picture to be used if you have multiple users. On single user setups you will enter directly into the mailbox area, while multiple user setups will be able to choose from a list of users inside Media Center.
Next setup the mail accounts for each user by selecting the user and pressing the Add new mail account (
) icon. For Gmail accounts, use pop.gmail.com, port 995, and enable SSL. Then enter your username and password. When you press the Apply button the program will double check that you are able to login to the server correctly.
For other accounts, check with your service provider for pop3 server information.
Now just open up Windows 7 Media Center and go into the Extra Programs. You should see an icon for Media Center Mail which will allow you access to the plugin. Once inside, choose the user you’d like to read mail for and you’ll be given a list of emails, sorted by date.
It’s worth noting that Media Center Mail doesn’t check for new mail immediately after starting Media Center and instead it appears to wait the default time set in the configuration before checking.
Also, it appears that Google doesn’t appreciate that the plugin attempts to download all emails since the beginning of the account and appears to put the brakes on the retrieval. This could also be a limitation put in place by the plugin developer, either way it make take some time to catch up with older accounts.
Selecting an unread email will take you to a simple reader window. The reader doesn’t support much beyond the basics however. You will be able to read the email as plain text, no images or urls, with no ability to reply or do much other than mark it as read or delete the message.
Maybe in the future we’ll see more features from the plugin but for now it’s a perfect tool for those who just need to take a break from work without missing out on important emails. This is one tool we’d love to see go open source as well, allowing for the collective community to add features to really open up the possibilities of 10-foot email.
For now, download and install Media Center Mail to give it a try. It’s definitely worthy software for your Media Center install and it supports extenders as well. For users with extenders make sure to check the option in the configuration for all users.
