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Reliable Wireless Email Through Cellphones?

Posted by Cliff on from the entering-email-with-10-keys-a-painful-experience dept.

neuroticia asks: "I recently purchased a cellphone and went with voicestream service with the expectation that I would be able to send emails through the cellphone using that service. However, my experience thus far is that only one out of every 5 outgoing emails gets through, and only 2 out of 3 incoming emails gets through. Has anyone found a wireless carrier who has a higher rate of success for delivery of emails sent through their service? Or even better- does anyone know of a wireless provider that *notifies* you when your email will not get through?"

3 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. get a gprs solution by rerunn · · Score: 2, Informative

    Get a gprs solution like a Blackberry. Doesnt have the 160 char limitation like SMS. And provides for delivery status to other blackberrys.

  2. Vodafone + Wap Works Great by gagravarr · · Score: 3, Informative
    I use the vodafone Wap email system, and it works great. It quite happily checks both POP3 and IMAP servers for mail (though no TLS on the connections yet). You can view your mail (and folders other than your inbox if using an IMAP mail server), send mail, file it etc. Works brilliantly, all it needs is a wap phone. Oh, and if you want, you can use GPRS to access the vodafone wap service, so you wouldn't even need to dialup before sending and receiving.

    Since you're probably in America, I'd go look for your local vodafone partner, and see if they offer a similar service. http://www.vodafone.com/ would be the place to start looking.

    --
    This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
  3. Not too much luck in the US, unfortunately. by neile · · Score: 2, Informative

    There are fairly few solutions for this that work reliably, especially in the US.

    Your problems with voicestream are expected: I assume your wireless email delivery solution with them is based on SMS, and unfortunately voicestream SMS delivery is far from reliable.

    You have a couple of options:

    1) Get a Blackberry (www.blackberry.com). The service is *expensive* on a monthly basis, but email delivery is rock solid. I had one for a while, and got addicted to it.

    2) Get a smartphone or a PDA with integrated wireless that supports POP/IMAP. There are a few on the market today (someone mentioned the Kyocera smartphone, there's also the Handspring Treo), although the current products are lacking in several regards.

    3) Wait a few months there will be Smartphone and/or wireless PDA combos from Microsoft (don't hurt me, they aren't bad products), or from SonyEricsson and Nokia. www.voicestream.com has pre-signup info for the MS wireless PDA, not sure on release dates for the SonyEricsson or Nokia devices.

    I know it sucks to say wait a few months, but things really will get better shortly. Most of the new devices rolling out are capable of real data connections back to your corporation through dial-up or VPN, and therefore don't have the security issues of forwarding mail through a gateway. The newer devices also support lots of local storage, so the viewing interactions are far better than with wap phones, where you have to be in coverage to deal with your mail.