I am experimenting with push e-mail on my Orange SPV M3100

Push e-mail is when you are immediately notified about the delivery of an e-mail to your account.

The traditional method of collecting your e-mail is called Pull when the user chooses to connect and receive the e-mail.

Good news first, Push e-mail works I get instant notification when someone e-mails me.

So far so good however, that’s about as good as it gets.

So why the down side?

Cost: Using Pull My Monthly data costs are £4, using Push they would be between £20 and £50 this is because the device has to have a permanent gprs connection to the mail server. Each hour it’s connected it sends a small packet of information out on the connection basically a heartbeat to tell the mail server it’s still alive. It’s a 19kb data packet per hour. Then when you do receive e-mail more data is used and therefore the costs go up.

Battery Life: Because a constant connection needs to be established this turns a device that will quite happily go 3 or 4 days without recharge now struggles to last a day.

Inconvenience: I spend my life solving problems, talking with people on the phone or doing concentrated work. Typically on a working day I can get 30 to 50 genuine e-mails but with push turned on I get interrupted momentarily 30 to 50 times a day. This is not good when you are knee deep in a business critical situation. You have to turn Push off to get anything done.

Spam and Not so relevant e-mail: Chances are the typical user has a Spam problem so they will routinely receive a percentage of e-mail that is spam these also get Pushed out. To stop that you have to have a pretty smart third party Spam filter and or very smart rules in your e-mail to decide what to push and what not to push.

Summary.

Email on move is a killer application. Pull is great, Push well….

Pro’s
Instant Access to incoming e-mail

Con’s
Cost
Battery Life
Inconvenient Intrusion

There are some line of business applications where this would be suited basically people who need information beamed to them for example their next appointment or service call. In that situation push makes sense but for your typical user (and I class myself as one) It’s not really worth it.

If you’re a North West based business looking help and advice about new technology then get in touch I can help you. Tel: 01606-841587.

Link: N/A

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 10:28 am and is filed under Blog Entries, Orange SPV M3100. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.