Firm pushes open-source BlackBerry alternative

Funambol released an open-source software product Monday that allows companies to provide e-mail services from several different types of e-mail servers such as Microsoft Exchange, IBM's Lotus Domino, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and POP (Post Office Protocol) servers. Funambol v3 is expected to become available as a free download on the company's Web site late Monday, and a version with additional features will be available for a fee.

The company joins a rapidly growing list of e-mail companies attempting to position themselves as an alternative to Research in Motion's BlackBerry software, which is staring down the barrel of an injunction in its patent dispute with NTP. Funambol v3 also can be used by wireless carriers to "push" e-mail directly to mobile devices as it is sent, rather than requiring users to log in to a central server to download their e-mail. It works with RIM's BlackBerry devices, Windows Mobile-based handhelds and phones that use specifications supported Open Mobile Alliance.

[aabcdefghij987654321]

So-called "push e-mail" is nothing new

Back in the days when we would log on to a shared system we would often read
our e-mail on that same system. Our e-mail would be delivered there to the
mail spool via a mechanism such as UUCP or SMTP with out any action on our
part.

Everything old is new again ...

[hadaso]

Those days are not over!

You can still access your email the old way if you have a shell account (like a free freeshell.org account).

However there are more user friendly ways of doing this: webmail is EXACTLY the same thing: connecting to a computer that has access to your email and getting it to send a representation of the email to be displayed on your display device. That's not true "push" technology. Your email is on a different device. You have to access it: login and query for new email. You only get a representation and not the message delivered to your device. WAP email interfaces (like FastMail.FM's wap interface) are the same as webmail and are tailored to mobile phones. You get the functionality of accessing a shell and then the mail command but without the extra step of first having to login to the shell and only then accessing email (and exiting twice when you finish).

With POP3 you do the same but get the email message itself delivered to your device upon request. IMAP4 does the same but allows much much more control over what is delivered to you (so it is much better than POP3 over low bandwidth connections or with a device that has limited storage capacity).

Finally, IMAP4 with the IDLE command exension gives you true "push technology": after a session is established the server alerts the client when there is a change to the mailbox, and the client can then decide what to do with it (alert the user, fetch the whole message otr just headers or just text and no attachments etc.) It might be problemetic if the device doesn't have a fixed IP address for the duration of a session.

[aabcdefghij987654321]

So-called "push e-mail" is nothing new

Back in the days when we would log on to a shared system we would often read
our e-mail on that same system. Our e-mail would be delivered there to the
mail spool via a mechanism such as UUCP or SMTP with out any action on our
part.

Everything old is new again ...

[hadaso]

Those days are not over!

You can still access your email the old way if you have a shell account (like a free freeshell.org account).

However there are more user friendly ways of doing this: webmail is EXACTLY the same thing: connecting to a computer that has access to your email and getting it to send a representation of the email to be displayed on your display device. That's not true "push" technology. Your email is on a different device. You have to access it: login and query for new email. You only get a representation and not the message delivered to your device. WAP email interfaces (like FastMail.FM's wap interface) are the same as webmail and are tailored to mobile phones. You get the functionality of accessing a shell and then the mail command but without the extra step of first having to login to the shell and only then accessing email (and exiting twice when you finish).

With POP3 you do the same but get the email message itself delivered to your device upon request. IMAP4 does the same but allows much much more control over what is delivered to you (so it is much better than POP3 over low bandwidth connections or with a device that has limited storage capacity).

Finally, IMAP4 with the IDLE command exension gives you true "push technology": after a session is established the server alerts the client when there is a change to the mailbox, and the client can then decide what to do with it (alert the user, fetch the whole message otr just headers or just text and no attachments etc.) It might be problemetic if the device doesn't have a fixed IP address for the duration of a session.