The facility to receive email on a mobile phone is a service offered by both Telecom and Vodafone. But what does it actually entail? How do you get email on your mobile phone, what does it cost, and are there any limitations to the services available?

Preparation

Firstly, you’ll need a data or WAP capable mobile phone. WAP stands for Wireless Access Protocol, a special communications protocol that lets your phone access particular data services. To check whether your phone can receive emails, call your mobile provider. Note that if you have a Telecom connected mobile you’ll need to be on the 027 network as you can’t get email sent to an 025 number. Once you’ve got the right phone, if you’re a home user or a business that uses an ISP (as opposed to a business with your own mail server) there are a couple of email-tomobile options.

Option 1

You can create an email address that resides on the website of Vodafone, or with Telecom’s ISP Xtra under a service called Xtra email. For example, my normal email address is vbland@watchdog.net.nz. If I set up a mobile phone email address with Vodafone it would be vbland@vodafone.net.nz and if I set it up with Xtra email it would be vbland@xtra.co.nz. Note that if you’re not already an Xtra customer you’ll pay $2.50 (+ GST) a month to access Xtra email. Your new mobile email address can only access email sent directly to that address. So emails sent only to your existing ISP won’t appear (unless you’re using a Telecom phone and are with Xtra). To use the WAP browser in your mobile to open and read the emails contained in these mailboxes costs between two and 10 cents per 10 kilobytes with Vodafone and a flat rate of 35 cents with Telecom.

While you can read the text part of these emails, you won’t be able to read an attachment with your mobile, and you may not be able to read an HTML format email (mobile phones prefer plain text). An alternative to reading your email in full is to have your mobile provider send a text message to your phone containing only the first 140 to 160 text characters of the email. This way you can see who’s emailed and hopefully get the gist of it (Vodafone and Telecom charge 20 cents per message for this).

Option 2

If the idea of having two email addresses doesn’t appeal, it is possible to connect to your own ISP and use the WAP browser on your phone. In theory, you can then access your mail messages directly. However, some ISPs block mobile phones trying to access their mail servers and the service may not work particularly well. You may also need to type in your user name and password each time you access your email (although some phones will remember it for you) and it may be hard to view your email as it in the inbox on your PC. If you think you’d prefer to get your email in this way, make sure you trial it with your current mobile provider before relying on it.

You’ll get mail

And it is possible to get emails sent to your mobile phone via your ISP and the Vodafone or Telecom network. The emails are copied, rather than diverted as is commonly believed, because they remain on your ISP’s server and download as usual to your normal inbox when you connect to your ISP – even if you’ve already read them with your mobile.

So do you always need to access your emails using a WAP browser? Not if you’re a business with your own mail server. In that case, you can subscribe to a mobile data service like Mobile JetStream from Telecom or GPRS from Vodafone and dial into your mail server directly. From there, you will be able to access and reply to your email (and view other parts of your computer system) providing you have a ‘smart’ phone with an email client loaded onto it. Viewing attachments will depend on what other applications you have loaded on your phone. However, it must be said that viewing attachments on a mobile screen is frustrating (and dangerous while driving) and a PDA or laptop is probably better suited to the job.

September 2003

By Vikki Bland