You’re on the road, disconnected from your
e-mail, not up to date and missing all sorts of important e-mails. What
do you do? Well, if you have a mobile phone you can ask someone at the
office to sit with your inbox open and read you all your e-mails, or
you can use a Push e-mail service.
Push e-mail eh? Tell me more!
Ok! Push e-mail boils down to this: as soon as someone sends you an
e-mail, your phone downloads it and goes beep! or brrring! or something
to let you know you have a new e-mail. Sounds a little too simple to be
revolutionary right?
Well, what you save is the time needed to go through a laborious
process of connecting your GPRS, dialing into your email server,
downloading the emails if you have any and so on and so forth.
(This would be ‘pull e-mail’ – user initiated checking in with
the e-mail server to pull any new e-mails off it and onto the phone.)
What you gain is the ability to read and respond to important emails
straight away while traveling, and stay up to date on what’s happening
back at the office.
Ok, and it works how?
For Push e-mail to work you need to have a service which will
monitor your mail server for new email and ‘push’ them to your phone
for you. The Blackberry phones which you can buy come with this service
bundled for example.
If you don’t want to be tied to a blackberry phone, you can use
various other services which have sprung up around push e-mail such as
the Dubai based Productiva or a free service like emoze.
Still don’t understand, it works how?
Ok it boils down to this:
Pull e-mail
[Mail server] / *new mail* <--- user checks in --- [phone]. New emails downloaded.
Push e-mail
[Mail server] / *new mail* —- mail sent —-> [phone]. Phone beeps with new email.
Right, ok. Those services you mentioned, got a recommendation?
Blackberry
Well, I haven’t used a blackberry phone personally but from
everything I hear they are pretty neat. The downside is that you will
be tied to the blackberry phone, because right now the blackberry push e-mail works only with blackberry phones. However, there is some news floating around that pretty soon windows mobile 6 users will be able to use the blackberry push e-mail service on their phones too, so you may want to wait for that to happen.
Productiva
Daniel has tried the Productiva services so he can give you a good account of how that works for him. Leave a comment Daniel!
Free
For the free services, there are only two things to be worried
about: security and how they work. Security wise you need to inform
yourself about what happens with your e-mails in between them being
taken off the mail server and sent to your phone, who has the rights to
the emails, etc. If you are dealing with alot of sensitive information,
you need to check up on these things beforehand.
How-it-works-wise, we will take emoze
as an example. For emoze to function, you need to download a program
from them and have it running on your home computer. The program will
basically check your email from your computer, and then send it to your
phone. Remember that secretary reading your emails to you which I
mentioned? This is basically like that, which is a serviceable low cost
solution if you care to leave your computer on 24 hours a day and you
can have someone reboot it when the inevitable windows error strikes.
As always, use the all knowing power of Google to do some research.
Closing words?
Well Productiva had some interesting statistics (and i quote):
- users can add upto 60 minutes of productive time to their workday (data from aberdeen group)
- Increased productive time can total upto 6 weeks anually (an increase of 12.5% in productivity
So it may be worth it to you to find out some more. What it boils down to is this:
If you have sensitive information and need things to just work: you
will need to pay for it. This means either a blackberry phone &
their bundled service, or Productiva depending on how Daniel rates them.
If you just want access to your emails and you can handle the
occasional glitch and down time, check out a free service like emoze.
