Blackberry vs Normal Push Email
Monday, August 18th, 2008Lately I have been thinking, what is the benefit of using blackberry? Because at the same time, I can use my push mail facility in my mobile phone. I am not sure about the other brands, but for SonyEricsson phone, there is a push mail option in smart phones (ie P1i, M600, etc) or and also in some new walkman series.
Currently, I am using my gmail account as my push email. These are some simple steps to use gmail as your push email:
1. activate IMAP feature in your gmail account (it’s free)
2. Configure your email account in your mobile phone, activate the push email option. In P1i/M600/P990, you can find this options under inbox setting. In walkman series, you can’t activate the push email manually, you will be prompted to activate the push email or not when you have your first IMAP connection and your phone detects the push email capability in your IMAP server.
3. Activate always on connection for your mobile phone (this is only required in P1/M600/P990). You can find this option by clicking more in the email account setting, before you choose the account that you want to configure.
4 That’s all.
I tried to use the self-build IMAP server, I was using students.itb.ac.id as my experiment, and the result is I can use my push email from that server too. These is a Howto check whether your server is supporting Push email or not
> telnet students.itb.ac.id imap
Trying 2001:d30:3:5::1…
Connected to students.itb.ac.id.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UIDPLUS CHILDREN NAMESPACE THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES SORT QUOTA IDLE ACL ACL2=UNION STARTTLS] Courier-IMAP ready. Copyright 1998-2005 Double Precision, Inc. See COPYING for distribution information.
^]
telnet> quit
Connection closed.
note: you can not use the above method if your imap server is only using SSL or TLS and not having any plain/unencrypted connection (ie: gmail).
From the result above, you see the IDLE options. IMAP IDLE (in my opinion) is the only thing that you need to enable push email in your server. The normal behavior of IMAP protocol is:
1. Your email client connects to the IMAP server
2. The client checks any new email and retrieve if any
3. The client log out from the server.
4. Step 1-3 is executed periodically depends on your email client setting.
The behavior is changed when your server has IDLE option and your client has push email capability, or in another word, your client is requiring IDLE option.
1. Your email client connect to the IMAP server
2. The client checks any new mail and download if any
3. Your email client stays connected
4. If any new email arrives, the IMAP server send it to your phone immediately.
That’s all you need to have your push email in your phone.
Just for your information in case you didn’t notice before, Blackberry hosts all your email in their server mostly in US and your GPRS provider has to create a kind of secure tunnel to Blackberry data center. So, if you have your corporate email located in OpenIXP (Open Indonesian Internet Exchange), your email need to send to blackberry server first in US and then you will retrieve your email via your GPRS provider who already has connection there. It is wasting times international bandwidth two times for me and the speed may also different. But, to be fair, if you create your own server, please make sure that your server has enough concurrent connection capacity to handle all your always connected users.
At this moment, I am using Gmail as my push email server, and telkomsel flash unlimited as my unlimited GPRS data plan. My P1i can live around 2 days before the next battery re-charge if I’m using GPRS/GSM connection and around 1 day if I’m using GPRS/WCDMA connection.
So, what is the benefit of the Blackberry then? Please someone let me know 
-rendo-
