Stefanie Khaw

Here’s a useful analogy which will hopefully help describe what the term “push email” really means. Imagine a world without postmen: To retrieve your mail, you’d have to have to go down to the post office every other day to check if you’ve received letters from anyone, like those with PO boxes (or more likely their office boys) regularly do.

Thankfully, we still have postmen and courier companies like DHL and FedEx, so everyone gets letters and packages delivered right to their doorstep everyday.

Email can be delivered in one of two modes – IE. pulled or pushed. In pull mode, users must actively initiate the reception of email. This means that an email message remains with the mail server until the user logs in and initiates a command to receive it. In other words, you’d have to make an effort to retrieve your email from the virtual post office.

On the other hand, push email works line a cyber-postman and automatically delivers email to recipients’ terminals without requiring any effort on their part whatsoever, and newly received e-mail messages show up immediately on your device without you having to log into your server every few hours. With push email services, users will receive emails instantaneously on their mobile devices in the same way that they receive SMS and MMS messages.

This service is certainly much more convenient than the traditional and more widely-used polling model. Users need not worry about problems like synchronization delays, login procedures, or even waiting for mail retrieval. Push email provides real-time access and users’ inboxes are updated automatically.

However, it’s only been possible to implement the concept of a digital email postman recently. Without always-on, high-speed broadband connectivity, it would not have made sense to stay online all the time on a 14.4 Kbps dialup modem. It would not only have been awfully slow but it would also have gobbled up your device’s battery life and cost you the earth in per-minute connection charges, which were too costly to allow for this luxury, so users normally dialled in to network to check their email several times a day.




Nowadays, we’re spoilt by high connection speeds at much cheaper prices, and by the incorporation of email programs onto mobile phones which have allowed us to utilise the “always on” capabilities of GPRS, EDGE and 3G to enjoy the convenience of having changes in our mobile device’s inbox instantly mirrored in our desktop mailbox.

Maxis announced last year that it had selected the Ericsson Mobile Organizer (EMO) push e-mail solution as part of its 3G offerings. The EMO service will set users back by RM30 per month with additional data usage charges ranging from 0.5-1 sen per kb. Alternatively, users can opt for an unlimited package for RM120 per month.

DiGi’s push email solutions is called SmartMail, powered by SEVEN, an award-winning global provider of software to mobile operators worldwide including: NTT DoCoMo, Orange, SingTel and Vodafone Italy. It promises to deliver highly secure real-time access to email, attachments, contacts and calendar information. It costs RM15 per month with additional data charges also in the range of 0.5-1 sen per kb while its unlimited package costs RM99.

Many phones support push email service, including the 02 Xda IIs; the 02 Xphone II; the Samsung SCH-i600; the SonyEricsson P800, P900 and P910, and a large number of Nokia phones. However, please note that some services strictly require you to use Microsoft Exchange as your email software. Across the causeway, SingTel announced in June that it had selected the Consilient Push™ email solution to bring mobile push email to over 1.2 million subscribers. Consilient’s new open standards-based innovation is more flexible and lets users receive push email on a wider range of phones and email systems.

To start with, SingTel is offering MobileMail on Nokia handsets, followed by Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Windows Mobile and Panasonic. SingTel subscribers will have mobile access to their Yahoo! And SingNet e-mail, in addition to SingTel’s BizWeb Solutions (BWS) hosted email service for small to mid-size businesses.

Push email is yet another service allowing more convenient email access for business users and consumers alike. Judging from the number of new phones offering this function and the number of mobile service providers implementing the service worldwide, it’s set to become a global standard for mobile phones everywhere in the near future.