Part of my empire is that I am a Director in a web hosting, e-commerce consultancy business. Our clients are small businesses who need an internet presence with a reasonable amount of hand holding. Periodically we get asked about push email for their PDAs.

There are several ways technically to achieve this:

  • Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 (or newer)
  • Blackberry
  • IMAP IDLE

None of these currently our email infrastructure caters for. After getting asked for about the hundred time by one customer I spent a little time looking in to it.

Exchange is a pain and stupidly expensive, considering this client would not be prepared to spend £10-15/month per email account. This instantly knocks out Blackberry also as it’s a similar cost and as you need to buy this through a mobile network, makes it impossible for us to mark it up of any value. So the cheapest option would be IMAP IDLE, but we’ve discounted that as we’re more than happy with our current email server.

This means we were in a bit of a sticky wicket. Around the same time I came across an email management methodology called Inbox Zero (I’ve discussed this here). For the purpose of this post, it really made me think about the idea of push email and if this wasn’t just some stupid fad being pushed by Microsoft to sell more Exchange licenses and Pocket PC enabled PDAs.

So let’s look at Push Email first. If you’ve got this far I’ll assume you know that this is a service where the network pushes automatically new emails to your PDA without any user interaction. This means no matter what place or time of day you’re connected to your corporate email.

The advantages of the user is that they have near immediate notification of new email and better efficiency on the server from being polled.

I’m a little sceptical about the latter one and my users don’t give a fig if I have a single email server or a server farm handling their emails as long as it works so I’ll not discuss this here.

Immediate Notification of Emails

Great, you’re on the train and an important email comes through from a prospective client. Great, reply to them and get the deal - superb customer service and a bigger bonus. We’ll that’s a great sales pitch, but in reality how often is that going to happen to the 99.9% of users here? Never I reckon.

I can see some benefit for one of our customers who has engineers on the road out installing air conditioning systems. He wants to get next jobs etc to them asap. Their PDAs would quietly be getting this information, while they are servicing Mrs Bloggs Acme Airmatic 2000!

However as much as that sounds logical, if they have their spanner in their hand, will they see or do you want them to be interrupted in their job with info on their next one? Not me if I was their boss and more importantly if I was Mrs Bloggs, I’d be royally annoyed that I was paying someone by the hour to fiddle with their PDA thingy-whatsit.

So why not just do a send and receive then they finish the job? Or an arguement that is valid for what ever situation you’re in, just set your email client to poll ever couple of minutes.

Having a Life (or should than be get one?)

There are two sides to this, if you are an employer if you can get your staff to pick up emails at home on their own time and to be at your beck and control all the better. However frankly, when I’m at home and not in work mode, I’m just not interested that some daft American wants some stupid slides done today because he forgot to ask last week while I’m eating my dinner with my family.

Of all the people who have Blackberrys, Motorola Qs et al, they are glued to the bloody things 24 hours a day. What is more they seem to have been brain washed in to think it’s in their own interest to be like this. “Oh it saves me stress in the morning reading my emails.”, “It keeps the boss sweet, will help my promotion.” and other such diatribe of rubbish. Yes your employer has loved you so much to give you a new toy, that’s entirely in their own interest. Wake up and smell the coffee.

Interrupts

The biggest reason why I would never want or currently prepared to offer such a service is that the interruptions from email are many and regular. You could easily spend all day servicing your inbox without achieving anything worth a damn. Wife’s tale or not, but every interruption costs you 15 minutes of your life to get back in the zone and continue. So why would you want more when you’re not in the office. Not being in the office is great, you can get so much stuff done.

Part of the idea behind the Inbox Zero approach is that you should not be driven by your inbox, but that you go back to email being a tool. You are not a drone to Outlook, break away be free and get some real work done.

Costs

To implement this based on Exchange system you would need:

  • New server hardware and associated support contracts etc
  • Exchange 2003 licenses
  • PDAs
  • Costly wireless data charges from your mobile network
  • Productivity drop of staff with such a device from being interrupted every X minutes.

Conclusion

In summary I can not see any reason both from a business perspective or technical one to warrant the time and more importantly substantial cost of implementing such functionality. In fact for our customers I suspect that it would cost them in wasted time and massive wireless data charges. If they are they desperate for it, or something similar use the regular Send/Receive mechanism in their PDA email client.

It’s a gimmic, a fad and as waste of money - don’t do it.