GRoK This!

When Good is evil

Here at work, they issue employees Treos. They install Good Mobile Messaging (GMM) on them so that employees have access to their Outlook email. Me being the good employee I am said "Can I get that installed on my personal Treo as well so that I can check my email remotely?" And so GMM version 4 got installed. I soon ran into the first gotcha. GMM took over my phone's address book, and all of a sudden I didn't have access to my hundreds of contacts that I had accumulated over the years. Slight panic sets in. However, I checked on the web and found a solution that let me have my address book back.

Flash forward a few months. I notice that there's an "Upgrade available" message on the GMM screen. So, I click it and rather easily a new version of GMM is installed (version 5). I had forgotten about the previous problem and went on my merry way.

Flash forward a week or two from that. I'm in downtown LA with my wife, who's looking for fabric, and I need to look up a number for someone, so I go to my address book...and it goes to GMM. Yikes. I looked on the menus for a way to switch it back, and then finally go to the Web on my phone's browser and end up finding the same solution that I had used before. So, I do the same thing...with no luck. Slight panic again. I try it a couple of times in case I did something wrong. No go. Now I'm frustrated. It should be easier than this. So, I decide to wait until that evening back home to do a more thorough web search for a solution.

It turns out that GMM 5 is harder to avoid than GMM 4. So, I decide to delete Good. Just rip it out of my Treo. That didn't quite work. I had to go in, using Filez, to delete the GoodAddressBookApp and reboot. That ended up giving me an infinite loop on bootup. So I hard-reset my Treo, wiping out all of my data in ROM. Note to self: remember to hotsync before mucking with the Treo again. Luckily I had done a fairly recent hotsync, and luckily I had moved most of my apps to the memory card, so I only lost a few addresses and no other application data. But, thankfully, Good was wiped from my Treo and I have access to my own address book again. If my employer asks if I want Good re-installed on my Treo again, the phrase "not in this lifetime" will be running through my head.

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Posted at 03:14PM Feb 04, 2009 by Gary Kephart in General  |