What is mobile email?

Mobile email offers the possibility of sending and receiving email from your mobile device wherever you are. You may even be able to use the same email account you have on your desktop or laptop computer.

How does it work?

There are several ways to receive email on a mobile device. These are to do with the application used, and the underlying technology that makes it possible. With web-based email services, a browser is used to access the email interface on the mobile device. With a client-server email implementation, the user interface is provided by the email client, which interacts with an email server to send/receive email messages. This is similar to email clients you may use on a desktop PC like Microsoft Outlook™.

In some email clients, such as BlackBerry, email is automatically retrieved when email is received. In other email clients, the user decides when and how often e-mail should be fetched.

Sophisticated mobile email solutions provide more features such as:

• Security via SSL/TLS encrypted connections to fetch and send email
• Speed and cost savings via the ability to only fetch mail headers initially
• The ability to download and edit common document attachments

Benefits of mobile email

• Mobile email has one of the highest impacts on productivity after voice
• Email is the office application most mobile workers would like to see integrated into their mobile phones
• Studies show that the availability of mobile email may result in up to an additional 55 minutes of work a day*

* "Enterprise Wireless Email Market Trends, 2003-2007", the Radicati Group