Saturday 13 August 2011

Problem Moving Email Accounts After BlackBerry Device Change

Image from Crackberry.com
Recently I decided to move back to my BlackBerry Bold 9000 from the 9780. With the bigger keyboard, silver edges and, believe it or not, the trackball, I find the 9000 an absolute joy to use. I ran into a problem though, my email accounts would not move over. I used email setup as usual and got presented with the screen accurately saying that a new device had been detected and my accounts had to be moved. I agreed and entered the passwords for each one, nothing happened. They reported success but no activation mails, no nothing.

The solution I found is unfortunately slightly typical of RIM in that it's unnecessarily complicated. Here's the solution that worked for me:
1. Rather than going to Email Setup navigate to http://mobile.blackberry.com on your device browser.
2. Select your country from the drop down.
3. Scroll down and select to Email.
4. Scroll down on the next screen and select Integrate Email
5, You will be presented with a screen notifying you that a new device is detected and asking you to move your accounts.
6. You will finally be presented with a screen listing each account and asking for your passwords to validate, enter the passwords one-by-one hitting the validate button on each as you go.
7. Once all accounts are validated you should be presented with a success screen and in 20 minutes your emails will start to arrive again.

I hope this helps anyone else who encounters this rather awkward problem.