Wireless e-mail at your fingertips?

Thirty-five million U.S. workers could benefit from mobile e-mail access, according to research firm The Yankee Group. But cost, security and geographic coverage constraints are slowing down the technology's adoption.

In this ZDNet Videocast, Eugene Signorini of Yankee's wireless advisory service chats with ZDNet Editor in Chief Dan Farber about the challenges in deploying wireless e-mail and provides guidelines for choosing platforms, devices and applications to ensure security and scalability.

[lysglimt]

A few things about mobile email access

For most people mobile email access is something they want on top of their usual access on their stationary PC (most people have one at the office or at home).
They want access to their email on their laptop or on a PDA or cell phone. There are a number of ways to go about this. One way is to synch your email using IMAP, another is to download your email using POP3 and a third is to push email using SMS or messaging technology.
Non of the above is satisfactory.

What you want mobile is to access ALL your email, both your new email and your email archive. On a PDA like a Palm or a Blackberry you can not have 1 or 2 GB of archived email avaliable. And using IMAP to synch more than two clients is a major hassle.

But most units now come with standard HTML internet access. So what you want is a simple web based access to a online server that has your new email and stores your entire email archive. This also ensures backup.

What are the services that allow you to do this?
Many services are now offering large sotrage space, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Runbox Mail and Hotmail all offer adequate storage. But can you access it? Gmail sports Java scripts that are unavaliable on most light PDAs and cell phones. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail sports complicated HTML pages that are based on and require you to download graphichs.
To solve this problem we developed the totally stripped down HTML based email archive system on Runbox Mail. With the text only plain HTML interface at mobile.runbox.com one can access ones entire 1-4 GB email archive on any slow badwith HTML capable unit be it a Palm, Blackberry as well as on your laptop or stationary PC.

Hans J Lysglimt
runbox.com