Wireless

Updated 5:45 p.m. PDT with more details about e-mail push.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Some of you who have been restlessly awaiting the arrival of Google's official Gmail push solution for mobile phones can relax now. On Tuesday, Google expanded the over-the-air syncing capabilities in its Google Sync service to include Google's e-mail--but only for the iPhone and iPod Touch (version 3.0), and for Windows Mobile phones.

Google Sync began as a beta service to sync Google calendar items and contacts to iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Symbian Series 60 phones. Owners of iPhones, iPod Touches, and Windows Mobile phones can now set it up to include Gmail messages as well.

The phones will receive Google Sync messages through their native e-mail, calendar, and address book apps. Depending on your settings, your phone could vibrate and/or chime to let you know that a new message has come in. Note that Google Sync will not push visual notification boxes to iPhone and iPod Touch interfaces. For that, you'll need third party apps like GPush for iPhone. Instead, it pushes e-mail from the server to the phone, rather than pulls in a list of e-mail messages, a request that the phone's e-mail client makes of the server. Push e-mail is often preferred over "pulled" e-mail for its real-time updates and its lower toll on battery life.

BlackBerry and Nokia Symbian Series 60 users won't have access to pushed Gmail yet, but they can still sync calendar and contact events to the phone's built-in address book and calendar.

To get started, visit m.google.com/sync from your desktop or mobile browser. The step-by-step setup process is best navigated from your computer, and will require you to ultimately configure your phone to sync over the Microsoft Exchange Server.

Related story: Gmail push on iPhone? Meet GPush

In a bid to make its online Google Apps more appealing to corporate customers, Google plans to release software in July to make its e-mail and calendar services work well on BlackBerry mobile phones.

Google Apps' e-mail and calendar services now get along better with BlackBerry phones.

(Credit: Google)

Today, corporate users can set up BlackBerry devices to check mail from Google's Gmail service, a part of Google Apps, but it works only in relatively rudimentary form. With a new product called--brace yourself--Google Apps Connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server, the company is adding much tighter integration with Research in Motion's BlackBerry technology.

Specifically, it synchronizes mail so a message marked as read on the BlackBerry will show that way on Gmail, and vice-versa, said Raju Gulabani, project management director for Google Apps. It also means people will be able to star, archive, and file messages in folders in either location.

In addition, people's BlackBerrys will be able to tap into corporate contact information, letting people use the device to retrieve e-mail addresses or phone numbers from the company directory. And calendar entries will be pushed to the device--though people won't be able to accept event invitations with the device until an update to the software is issued later this year, he said.

"In terms of the features we're delivering, (it's) not just nice to have, it's pretty critical," Gulabani said, because it means Google Apps users will get the full BlackBerry experience.

One reason for the change is because Google wants to make it easier for companies to switch from their own e-mail, contacts, and calendar systems--Microsoft Exchange being the most prominent example--to the Google-hosted replacement. "We want to make that change easier, and make it easier to deploy Google apps. One way is by giving them existing interfaces," so they don't have to use Google-specific software such as the downloadable Gmail for Mobile application for BlackBerry devices, he said.

Google Apps consists of a number of online services: e-mail, calendar, and the Google Docs suite for word processing, spreadsheets, forms, and presentations. Google Apps Standard Edition is free but limited to customers with 50 or fewer accounts; the Premier Edition costs $50 per user per year but doesn't have those limits. Google also offers a free version for customers in education that doesn't have any user limits.

The BlackBerry connector software comes free with the Premier or Education editions, Gulabani said.

Update 4:22 p.m. PDT: Comments from a Research In Motion representative added.

BlackBerry users around the country were without e-mail for about 3 hours in a nationwide outage that affected users on all major wireless networks.

BlackBerry Curve

(Credit: Research In Motion)

From about 1 p.m. EDT to about 4 p.m. EDT people who subscribe to a BlackBerry e-mail service through their wireless carrier instead of being offered the service through their companies, could not send or receive e-mail or access the BlackBerry Internet Service Web site. They also weren't able to create new accounts, access their Internet mailboxes, integrate third-party e-mail accounts, or view e-mail attachments during this time.

Marisa Conway, a spokeswoman for Research In Motion, the company that makes the BlackBerry devices and operates its push-e-mail service, said that "some customers experienced a delay receiving e-mail earlier today, but it wasn't system-wide." Service is now operating normally, she added.

But a representative from Sprint Nextel confirmed the outage and said the outage also affected the BlackBerry Internet Service Web site.

Subscribers on all four major U.S. wireless networks--AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless--complained that they had no access to e-mail until about 4 p.m. EDT, at which time they started getting a flood of e-mails that had been sent earlier in the day.

Research In Motion, the company that makes BlackBerry smartphones, offers two main services for connecting to the Internet and getting access to e-mail. The first is RIM's enterprise solution, which requires companies use a BlackBerry server through which all corporate e-mail goes through. It links directly with a user's work e-mail, contacts, calendars, and business applications.

The other service offered by RIM is the BlackBerry Internet Service, whrough which it provides consumers with connectivity to personal e-mail services and the subscriber's carrier acts as the liaison between the users e-mail and the BlackBerry smartphone.

RIM uses a centralized architecture to filter all its e-mail traffic and push it out to consumers' phones. Critics of the BlackBerry service and architecture say that this centralized approach makes the service more vulnerable to outages. And indeed, the company has had some serious outages in the past. In April 2007, the company's enterprise service suffered a huge outage that left millions of corporate BlackBerry users without access to e-mail.

While any sort of outage is not good, the fact that the problem affected consumers rather than corporate customers is an important distinction. Some of the BlackBerry users, who had lost e-mail for a few hours, said they didn't even notice that they weren't able to send or receive e-mail. By contrast, during the massive corporate BlackBerry two years ago, consumers felt the affect more acutely as many business users rely on their BlackBerry devices for corporate e-mail.

That said, there are still many small-business and self-employed people using RIM's BlackBerry Internet Service for business purposes. What's more, as RIM aggressively courts consumer customers, the company will need to avoid service glitches of any kind to woo consumers that already have a wide array of options when it comes to smartphones. The smartphone market is highly competitive, and cell phone users don't need another reason to choose an alternative device, such as Apple's iPhone or the upcoming Palm Pre.

An "e-mail counter issue" is at the root of at least some confusion over the status of e-mail sent during a Saturday outage to Comcast.net free residential e-mail, Comcast says.

According to spokesman Charlie Douglas, subscribers who regularly access Comcast e-mail through external POP clients may notice a discrepancy between the number of new e-mails displayed on the company's site and in their actual in-boxes. This may be leading people to believe that they have lost e-mail when, in fact, they have not.

Douglas said the company is working on a case-by-case basis with subscribers who are experiencing issues like this one, posted by CNET reader "jeninmd":

When I was finally able to log on to the Comcast Web site about 5 p.m. Saturday, April 4, it told me I had 31 new messages (which sounded about right). But when I clicked on the link to see them, it said I had none...I went back to their Web site today, Sunday, April 5, and it said I had 3 new messages. But the same thing happened; they disappeared when I clicked on my in-box!

Douglas reiterated on Monday that the company believes that intermittent disruptions in service Saturday, which lasted about 10 hours, did not result in lost e-mails but rather in delayed arrivals of messages. And he said the next version of Comcast's SmartZone Web mail interface, expected to debut this summer, will correct the message-counting discrepancies.

Via e-mail, however, the same reader who complained of 31 phantom messages--Jennifer Brasher--said she has "proof" of lost messages. "I called my sister, and she had sent me three, which I never got," she said. "I also know for sure that Telecharge e-mailed me a ticket I had purchased."

Brasher said a Comcast customer service representative with whom she spoke Monday afternoon "reluctantly admitted that e-mails were lost when I backed him into a corner."

The representative "did briefly mention an issue with external clients, but I explained to him that I wasn't running my POP client (Windows mail on Vista) because it couldn't access their server, so I took it down," Brasher wrote. "I am a former career software developer, so I wasn't buying his lame excuses."

Other users are voicing their concern as well. Responding to a story about the outage on AppScout, reader "Pamela" on Monday morning wrote, "Well, here it is two days later, and no e-mail. I am waiting for confirmation of my e-filed taxes. Um, this is not good at all!!!"

Responds Comcast's Douglas: "We're working with the engineers to investigate any claims. We take this very seriously."

Updated to reflect that e-mail service is back and to add comments from Comcast.

Comcast e-mail customers: no, it's not just you.

Comcast e-mail servers experienced an outage, according to the company's Twitter feed and this message on Comcast.net. A fix arrived hours after expected.

(Credit: Comcast)

Users of the company's e-mail service have been out of luck accessing the service since "at least" 6 a.m. PT, according to an e-mail tip received by CNET News on Saturday.

Although Comcast did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter, its Comcastcares Twitter feed, as well as its Comcast.net service hub, did confirm the outage. It has been communicating with the "server company"--the maker of the server--to help resolve the problem.

While a fix was previously expected at 11 a.m., according to the Twitter feed, e-mail is still down.

"I do apologize," tweeted Frank Eliason, director of digital care for Comcast. "I am waiting for an update on the new errors."

Update at 2:45 p.m.: Eliason now says, "Mail is starting to come back online and will take time for all to be uploaded...Ugh! What a day!" A reader also confirms (via her Comcast.net e-mail address) that her access has returned.

Update at 4:15 p.m.: Eliason just e-mailed me, saying the e-mail server that suffered the outage was owned by Comcast. He declined to disclose the name of the company that built it.

Update at 11:15 a.m. Sunday: Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas tells me that the cable giant is still investigating the cause of the Saturday e-mail outage. Engineers are not yet certain whether it was initiated by a failure in power, hardware, or systems. It is also trying to determine how many e-mail servers and customers were affected by the outage, of which it became aware at 4:30 a.m. PT Saturday.

"Our priority is getting the systems stabilized," Douglas said.

No outgoing or incoming e-mail has been lost by users of its residential e-mail system, SmartZone, he assured me. Those accounts come free with Comcast's high-speed Internet service, to which he said 14.7 million people subscribe.

"There's quite a backlog" of messages in the server queue, he said, that are expected to fully clear out in the next few hours, depending on the volume.

Douglas did not have a figure for how many subscribers actively use the free residential e-mail accounts, but he did clarify that Comcast's paid business-class e-mail accounts, which rely on Microsoft Communication Services, were not affected by the outage.

While Douglas said the company has not sent out an e-mail to subscribers regarding the outage, he said that in addition to the Comcastcares Twitter feed and Comcast.net, customers could find further information about the outage on the company's Comcast Voices blog, which launched at the end of March.

Correction, January 21, 9:14 a.m. PDT: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the scope of IBM's acquisition. IBM is acquiring only certain assets of Outblaze.

Computing giant IBM has announced its intention to acquire assets from a Chinese e-mail and messaging company.

Hong Kong-based firm Outblaze sells hosted multilingual e-mail and messaging services for other service providers, telecommunications companies, and corporations to operate under their own brands.

Outblaze intellectual assets, including code and staff, will become part of IBM Lotus' Bluehouse project, IBM's online-business and social-networking and collaboration service, IBM announced on Thursday. Bluehouse is currently in open beta testing.

"The acquisition of these Outblaze assets further demonstrates Lotus' commitment to delivering secure, scalable online solutions, and will help accelerate delivery of collaborative services, with little to no IT involvement," Bob Picciano, the general manager of IBM Lotus Software, said in a statement.

Security experts warned that companies considering moving to hosted e-mail services in developing countries should think about where their data will reside, and choose their provider carefully. While Hong Kong is a highly developed autonomous region of China, a report last week warned that emerging markets such as China are at greater risk of cybercrime, while the U.S. government warned in November that the Chinese government was using advanced cyberespionage techniques.

"With any hosted service, you have to do due diligence, look at the system and how it's being managed," said Andy Buss, a senior analyst at Canalys.

Buss recommended that businesses either use a trusted local company or one of the trusted larger providers, such as IBM, for hosted messaging services. The analyst added that as more workers start to rely on online tools, companies have to work out how to integrate tools and work flows.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.