[Adirondack]

YEA! Success.

Predictably, the folks at Verizon were fairly useless in their knowledge of the Treo. However, the tech help line at Palm was fabulous. Quite possibly the best customer service experience of my life. Here's what happened, in case in helps a Verizon user later on -

Yes, VersaMail is free with Verizon and the 755p. But, it does not come installed on the phone, and they say that you cannot directly download it to the Treo - It needs to be downloaded via your computer, then you perform a hotsync to get it over on the Treo. To download Versa, you HAVE to sync the phone to your Treo and have the Palm software installed on your computer.

The customer service rep at Palm was awesome, helped my set up the complicated sync to my Mac, and walked me through the VersaMail setup (and even suggested I send and check a few emails with attachments to make sure it was working while we were still on the phone). Happy ending - My email now works perfectly, and the mysterious red attachment paperclip is visible and working!

Knowing what I know now, I realize that the Verizon help person was just blowing hot air and doing a lot of "but it SHOULD be working" when she didn't understand what was wrong. Now that I understand the Versa system, I know that she did not know what she was talking about. Lesson? Call Palm, not Verizon.