Mobile Email
The main application which accompanied the rise of the Internet was email. The availability of a personal address for all and the ability to send and receive written messages and pictures gained acceptance fast. It followed from this adoption that the primary application of the new Mobile Internet would be mobile access to email: the use of a mobile phone to access an individual's email account when on the move so you can both send and receive emails from your internet email acount. This is pretty much how it has turned out with a number of ways of accessing email on the move having evolved.
The first and still the most straightforward method to become available was the use of the browser on the mobile phone to connect to your Internet email account. This is similar in concept to the browser experience on a PC. However the limitations imposed by the small screen of a mobile device means a special facilty which caters for mobile access must be used.
Custom software was developed which recognised the type of mobile device being used and formatted the information on screen appropriately. A good example of a free to use service offering this facility can be found at
This offers access to any internet account from the web browser with the options to specify access from a PDA screen or a WAP browser. Its probably one of the simplest ways to see and experience email on your mobile phone.
Corporate systems such as Microsoft Exchange's Mobile Access Server offer similar capabilites.
Mobile Access using Exchange Server
POP3 Client
Internet email is stored on what is called a POP Server. (Post Office Protocol) To retrieve the emails from the POP Server and store them on a PC a POP client is used such as Microsoft Outlook Express. The emails can then be read without having to be connected to the server. To send an email, the client application connects to an SMTP server (Simple Message Transport Protocol). Any message which are queued in the email outbox are then sent to their destination address. (which is a POP server)
Most mobile phones have an email POP3 client provided. This means they can be configured to connect to an Internet email account and then download any emails for viewing on the device. They can also be setup to send emails through the SMTP server associated with the Internet Email account. This method has the advantage that the emails can be downloaded and then viewed offline without a network connection.
Push Email
Having access to email in one of the above fashions was all well and good but it relies on the mobile user to connect and check email on a regular basis. For a mobile user this could be fairly intermittent. The concept of 'push email' evolved to solve this problem. What this means is a service is provided which will regularly check a specific email account and when a new email arrives, it is picked up by the service and pushed to and stored on the mobile device. The first mainstream use of this facility was with RIM Blackberry which is detailed in a separate section of this site.
The leading products for push email services to standard mobile phones are shown below. A review of each of these will follow shortly.
Seven
Good
Visto
Intellisync
iAnywhere
Funambol
OpenHand
These products are typically used by an Enterprise to provide a Push Email service for its employees or by a Mobile operators to offer a Push Email service to its subscribers.
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