E-Mail Alternative for BlackBerry

[bblboy54]

I love my blackberry... well, mostly. It just isn't being a reliable way of getting my email anymore. BlackBerry had another outage today (according to T-Mobile) and I didn't receive email between 9am and 12:30pm EDT which is a crucial time for me since it is when I am mobile and organizing my work day. Besides the outages emails are taking up to 45 mins to get to my device at times but the average is around 15 mins which isn't acceptable during my work days since I have tickets that need to be responded to quickly.

I know that the standard response I will probably get is "go with blackberry enterprise" but the problem with that is BlackBerry does not support any Linux based mail servers and it is virtually impossible for me to migrate my company to windows servers. And yes, I have a push email account from T-Mobile but if I forward all of my email addresses to that then I lose the functionality of IMAP which is important since I get 300-800 emails in a day and need to be able to mark them as read globally when I receive them so when I'm back at my computer I know where I need to pick up from.

I found an application called "LogicMail" but so far I havent been able to find a way to get this program to alert me when there is new mail and it also doesnt seem to "stay resident".

Does anyone have any recommendations of software that I can use in order to accomplish what I need to? I know it's ironic that I'm addicted to my blackberry and the only thing I hate about it is what its famous for but my Pearl supports everything that I need it to and having MiniUSB charging is an awesome feature but I need to be able to get my email to my device faster than what blackberry's servers can with IMAP.

[sunkast]

The outage today was a scheduled outage. Everything should be back to normal by tomorrow.

I can only think of a few suggestions. The first of which is to cut out forwarding of email. Think of it like this, the more servers the data has to go through before being delivered the longer it's gonna take.

My other suggestion is if email is so important, why not just get an ultra portable laptop and a data card. That way you have an optimal keyboard to write out a response and you can have one device for all your email.

[bblboy54]

I need something that is with me at all times and connected to the net (via cell) as well. A mobile phone is what I need.

I'm not forwarding anything. I have blackberry set up to pull email directly from my IMAP servers but it only pulls this mail every 15 mins (according to blackberry) and can sometimes take 30-45mins to get to me. At the times when I am at home I will see an email hit my computer and blackberry won't deliver that email to me until long after that.

[bblboy54]

also, you say this was a scheduled outage. where do we find these outage notices?

[cjcarbone]

Right on the fromt page, a few blogs down.

Also, -= Dataoutages.com =-

[sunkast]

The outage was also posted on the CB blog.

Ok so not let me run through a theory I have. I read the forums on a daily basis, and to me it seems like there are a lot of people that have issues with using imap on their BB versus pop.I think because you're using the IMAP protocol it's going to take longer to receive messages. I've read a couple times that BIS servers don't fully support the imap protocol either. Like I said this is just a theory of mine.

[bblboy54]

I have to agree that IMAP is something that blackberry doesnt fully support but the issue of the delay is the same. For both IMAP and POP the blackberry servers check your email account and then push that email to your phone. In either case, blackberry only checks your account every 15 mins unless it receives an email. If it receives an email it will check again in 3 mins and then return to 15mins. When you are working with real time trouble tickets this delay can be frustrating.

In actuality, the design of IMAP should make this much more reliable than POP because IMAP is more of a 2 way communication if you implement it as such. An IMAP server will tell you when you have received new mail because the connection can remain constant whereas POP can't tell you anything until you request a command.

Either way, BlackBerry doesnt give you an option to change the ping time for your external accounts from the default of 15 mins (this includes IMAP and POP) and this is what I've been directly told by T-Mobile and BlackBerry support.

[Xopher]

It seems like LogicMail is the right app for you to get past the delay. Have you checked your BB's profiles to see if a notification option was added? It may have possibly been added, but isn't set.

I know when I installed JiveTalk, it added notofication options to my profiles, but they were all set to "Mute". I had to configure the notification so I would know if a new conversation had been initiated.

Possibly the same thing has happened with LogicMail? It might be as simple as adding a tone setting in profiles.