Nokia E5: Unable to Create Mailbox [Solved]

If you are unable to set up your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Rediffmail, etc., etc. on your Nokia E5’s email setup application (also known as Nokia Messaging) then this is the right place for you. This took me a couple of days of frantic searches all over the Nokia discussion forums and Google. Finally, I figured out a foolproof workaround.

There’s a bug in Nokia’s preset configurations which doesn’t allow the mailboxes to be created. So we will fool Nokia and enter the settings manually (don’t worry, its real simple).

So here is what you should be doing:

1. Enter e-mail setup.
2. You will get some short description about Nokia’s privacy policies, don’t even bother to read those because we are not going to involve Nokia or its servers for setting up our mailboxes (remember I said “manually”).
3. Press “Start“.
4. Your E5 will now start preparing for setup and take you to a screen having all different preset configurations for Ovi Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Rediffmail, etc., etc.
5. Scroll down and you will find “Other“. This is what we are going to use.
6. On selecting “Other“, you will be asked to enter your email address. The real fooling trick starts here. Let us suppose we want to setup Gmail and our email address is silchar@gmail.com. Instead of entering the actual email address we will enter silchar@abc.com. If we enter gmail.com after the @ sign then Nokia will use the preset configuration for Gmail and this will defeat our whole purpose of going manual.
7. Now it will prompt you to enter your password. You can enter your correct password here.
8. Nokia will now try to validate your email account. Fortunately it can’t because we entered some self-made-up domain (abc.com).
9. Now you will get three options: Mail for Exchange, POP/IMAP and Lotus Notes Traveler.
10. Select “POP/IMAP“.
11. Before going to the next step on our Nokia E5, we will get hold of a browser and open our Gmail Account to set up POP/IMAP. For this we will have to go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab under Mail Settings. Now enable POP/IMAP/both.
12. I am a big fan of IMAP. So, I will be setting up IMAP access on my E5.
13. On selecting “POP/IMAP” we will get to the screen where we have to enter all the settings manually. The first and second fields named E-mail address and User name will now contain the value silchar@abc.com. We need to correct both the field values and enter silchar@gmail.com (replace abc.com by gmail.com).
14. We don’t have to edit the Password field as we had already entered the correct password in Step 7.
15. Enter the following details in the rest of the fields: 
    

    Mailbox type: IMAP 4 

    Incoming mail server: imap.gmail.com 

    Incoming mail security: SSL/TLS 

    Incoming port number: 993 

    Outgoing mail server: smtp.gmail.com 

    Outgoing mail security: SSL/TLS 

    Outgoing port number: 465

16. Click “Save“.
17. Nokia will now successfully create the mailbox for you.

This method will work for other email services as well. You will just need to enter the correct settings in the respective fields.  Do leave comments if this works for you. Happy E-mailing 🙂