I invited myself to open a Google mail account (“Minna, Minna has invited you to open a Google mail account”), created a new account, and set it to allow POP usage. Then I took up on setting up the phone.

“Neat, a settings wizard!” I thought. I ended up using a Gmail account because Gmail was in the list of available providers. (Didn’t help though, but at least Gmail has good spam filtering.) I selected the outgoing server, email address, username, password… Then I fetched my mail. It worked. When I tried sending an email to thank Minna (that is, me) for the invite, the phone got stuck on “connecting to Gmail…” Then I thought, “well then, I guess I need to use the operator’s outgoing mail.” I set the outgoing server and encryptions, ports, things like that, and left the username/password empty (I don’t have a username/password. Unless they mean the un/pw for admin interface for the phone subscription which is not mandatory to register to). Then I tried sending the mail but it kept asking me for un/pw. Oookay.

Luckily I decided to google “email settings nokia n73” and found “Push E-mail (sort of) on Nokia N80 and N73” at Alex’s space. I would’ve commented and thanked for the instructions, but the comments were closed. Perhaps this thank-you will reach him. :)

I followed the instructions #2 and got very close to the solution. I only had to define port and security settings for incoming and outgoing mail, and then — like magic — the mail that was stuck in the outbox suddenly disappeared into the ether and travelled to my main Gmail account.

Long story short, now I have a working email account for my mobile phone!
Why do I need an email on my phone? I don’t know…

Update: I didn’t remember reading Anthony Pranata’s instructions on setting up a Gmail. There you can find screen shots of the process.