The first thing you need to know about getting email to your mobile phone or PDA is that it’s easy.

“There’s a perception that getting email onto a mobile device is complex, but I haven’t found a mobile device I couldn’t get email working on,” says Bruce Fowler, a consultant for mobile consultancy firm BF Concepts.

For that to be true, a mobile device first needs to be capable of receiving email. While many are, some do not have an email client as part of their software meaning they cannot send or receive email no matter how clever the other functions of the device. Check out MyMobile magazine’s full Buyer’s Guide (available at magazine outlets and www.mymobile.co.nz).

Generally though, most high-end PDA’s and mid to high-end mobile phones have email functionality. Those running the Windows Mobile operating system offer a particularly rich mobile email environment - emails appear similar to the way they look on a desktop or laptop screen, albeit smaller. For mobile phones that are merely email-capable, the email address and subject header is viewed with a few lines of the body copy of the email text. Users then decide what emails they will view or download to the mobile device (more later on how this happens).

Another common myth around mobile email is that a mobile device will need an email address different to a user’s standard email address. In fact, anyone may register a domain name - either through an ISP, email host, or by registering one for themselves - and have all other email addresses from different devices, including mobile devices, point to it. However, if you use an ISP for email and don’t want your own domain name, a mobile device may have a unique email address, depending on the system the ISP or email host uses.

Which device
Fowler says the best mobile email devices are those that allow the user to see and use email as they want to. Blackberry devices, Windows Mobile devices or those with a Symbian or Palm operating system are best for people who want a rich email experience with attachments easy to see. If the device uses Windows Mobile, there will also be miniapplications of Microsoft Word and Excel which can be used to edit Word or Excel attachments. But there are trade-offs for this kind of email experience.

“A rich email experience sounds great but the better email looks, the more battery power it uses,” says Fowler. He says people who opt for simpler mobile devices tend to want to see what their email contains, rather than work on them.

Meanwhile, many new mobile phones have a basic email client that allows users to read the date of the email; see who it is from and get a look at the subject line header and text. These devices, which include Blackberry devices, can also view almost any attachment – a word document, Powerpoint presentation or PDF – and depending on the device and software, these may be able to be edited even if the device doesn’t run Windows Mobile.

If you need help choosing the right mobile email device, it pays to ask. Both Vodafone New Zealand and Telecom Mobile have data specialists in their retail stores, as do mobile business specialists. People with several devices to configure, or those confused about how to configure an office email server to deliver email to a mobile device, can use mobile consultancy services like Mobile Mentor (contracted by Vodafone to work in partnership with customers), Telecom Mobile consultants – or mobile email specialist providers such as ICONZ or ZeroOne (click here for details of ZeroOne’s AnywhereExchange offering).

But how does email get to the mobile device?
That depends on where the email is hosted, and here, users have choices. If a person’s email is hosted by an ISP, then as long as the ISP allows mobile devices on the Vodafone or Telecom network to access its network, email can be viewed as it sits on the ISP’s server by logging on to the web mail account using the phone’s browser, or downloaded to the mobile device if that’s what the user wants to do with it.

“I am not aware of any ISP that cannot provide a connection to and from a mobile device over both networks; although you might need minor email address changes and enablers to access [some ISPs],” says Fowler. Alternatively, email can be hosted on the business’s own email server and accessed by a mobile device – similar to the way a laptop is used to remotely connect to an office network and accesses email. To configure remote devices to access email, business typically need to be running either Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange Server or Microsoft Small Business Server software.

Many people wonder what happens to the email sitting on an office server, or their ISP’s server, once it is downloaded to a mobile device. For example, if you download an email to your mobile device, is it then deleted from the ISPs server? If not, will it download to your desktop email client in the normal way later even though you have already read it? And if you send an email from your mobile device, do you have to copy it to the sent folder on your desktop email client manually?

IMAP, POP and the ‘Crabby Office Lady’
Answers to the above questions depend on the type of technology the email host is using. Most ISPs use the Post Office Protocol (POP) email protocol. Unfortunately, POP email does just that; it pops an email into your mobile device when you download it from the ISP’s email server and deletes it at the host or ISP end. (You can opt to leave deleted email on a POP host server, but the ISP will usually put a line through it to show it has been downloaded or deleted. It then may, or may not, depending on the ISP, be downloaded in its original form to another device like a desktop client later.)

Either way, the host server has no idea what a mobile user has done to an email once the email is “popped” from the server to the mobile device. If the email has been read or replied to and you want a record of it on your desktop email client, you will have to copy email from your mobile device back to your email address in order for the new communication to be recorded on your desktop email client. The whole process is clunky, unproductive and time consuming and you run the risk of forgetting to copy crucial information stored in your mobile device back to your desktop email client. POP therefore is an inefficient protocol for business mobile email solutions.

IMAP superiority
The answer is to use an IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) service from either an email host, telecommunications provider, or your own office email server. According to Microsoft’s ‘Crabby Office Lady’ (online columnist Annik Stahl) IMAP allows you to keep email messages stored on the hosted server and create and move folders or mailboxes, delete messages, or search for certain parts of a message – all from the server. Because the work you do on your email is not stored on your mobile device, you stay connected to the host’s server through your mobile data network provider, and the host server alerts your mobile device to new email as it arrives. This special “always on” data service is different and charged separately by Telecom and Vodafone to the much more expensive mobile voice calls (more on this later).

The beauty of IMAP services is that the same email view exists between all devices and all email actions are synchronised. So IMAP email opened, read and forwarded from a mobile device shows as read and forwarded on the host server. If you reply to an email from the mobile device, the reply will be in the sent folder of the email client on the host server. Fowler says IMAP is a far more efficient way of managing email than POP, and if the host and the mobile device both support Microsoft’s Active Sync software, mobile users can not only access email but full email client features including out of office auto replies, full address book and calendar. Hosted email is also a handy if you lose or break a mobile device or laptop.

“If I smash my phone, all my contacts, email, calendar is all on a hosted server that is regularly backed up. I can grab a new phone and get all my information back because the phone is not the main store for the email and contact details,” says Fowler.

Hosts with the most
Unfortunately, only a small number of organisations offer hosted IMAP mobile email services. Bruce Trevathen’s email host firm ZeroOne is one that does (so does Vodafone, Telecom and ICONZ). Trevathen reiterates that there are three ways to get email to a mobile device. “The most basic is a simple text view of email stored on a server and seen from a mobile device. You need a Web browser or WAP browser on the mobile device and nothing is synchronised so it’s all pretty annoying,” says Trevathen. He says the second way has the email hosted on a server at the user’s domain name and synchronised through IMAP, Microsoft Exchange Server and ActiveSync software.

Trevathen says the third way is to use a Blackberry device. However, because Blackberry devices do not 3talk2 to Microsoft Exchange Server software (BlackBerry does not support Exchange Active Sync), they need to use the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) a service Trevathen says ZeroOne will offer in the very near future.

Trevathen says there are also advantages to using a hosted or managed email service even if a business has its own email server - a host provides automated virus scans, spam filtering and the all-important backups and email archiving; tasks few small businesses do regularly enough. Another example, says Trevathen, is the ZeroOne client who previously had to pay for a dedicated 2MB data link into its business so branch offices could access email hosted on the head office server. Each morning, workers from multiple branches and remote locations would log into the head office server to get email which affected the performance of the data network. Trevathen says because Zeroone now hosts the email sent and received from all email addresses attached to the business, the company’s network is free for other uses and bandwidth costs have been reduced. (Click here for full details on ZeroOne’s AnywhereExchange)

ICONZ, which offers a hosted service based on Microsoft Exchange called OfficeOnline, points out that POP3 mailboxes do not use all the functionality of Microsoft Outlook like allowing users to share calendars, contacts and set up meetings. OfficeOnline also eliminates the hassle of accessing your mailbox from multiple locations with multiple access points as well as continuous synchronisation.

What does mobile email cost?
This depends on how well you set up the software on your mobile device. Although in theory, mobile email is paid for according to email data uploaded or downloaded between the host server and the mobile device, because the mobile device automatically connects to the host on a regular basis (usually every five minutes) and requests any email, each requests count as a data exchange and is charged. The data size of each of these requests is small, but over the course of a month it all adds up and is termed “overhead.” Fowler says the best way around this is to set up the mobile device to requests email from the host at longer intervals – say 60 minutes. Or people can turn the automatic check off altogether and manually use the send and receive function on the device to check for email.

Once you get that sorted out, what do actual email transfers cost? Not much, actually. Both Telecom and Vodafone offer similarly competitive rates per kilobyte – Jeremy Foster, head of business products and services for Vodafone New Zealand says mobile email traveling over the Vodafone data network is charged at about 10 cents per kilobyte. So an email with an 80KB word attachment would cost about 80 cents to send and receive. (Unlike text, you pay for email data sent from your mobile device as well as for data you decide to download to it.)

For more details on Vodafone and Telecom’s Email+; Enterprise and Lite hosted services and data plans see www.istart.co.nz/mobile-business.htm

March 2006

By Vikki Bland