Push email - The Ultimate Oxymoron?

[Ewan]

After two years of marketing hype, Steve Litchfield still finds himself struggling to understand the appeal of push email. Surely the whole concept of email (or indeed mail) is that it's a non-real time medium, to be read at the recipient's convenience? Read on...

Let's see if I've got this straight. With push email, central servers collect email from your standard IMAP4 or POP3 mailboxes, 'pushing' new emails out to your smartphone using standard SMS and/or Internet protocols, with audible alerts sounding, lights flashing or icons winking to tell you that you've got a new email that needs reading. So you're going about your business and end up being distracted every few minutes either by something new arriving or by wondering whether something has arrived since you last looked. And somehow, to achieve this state of affairs, vendors seem to be falling over themselves to sell push email solutions, both hardware and software.

Contrast this to the way God intended email to work. At a time of your convenience, in a break from something else, you check what's arrived in your mailbox since the last time you checked. Which may be 10 minutes, 1 hour or 10 hours, depending on how you run your life. The point is that the checking and reading of email happens without interrupting what you're busy doing. If something's really urgent and people want to get your immediate attention, they're going to phone you anyway, rather than risk their communication at the whims of a relay of mail servers.

I have a friend who's been proudly proclaiming how pleased he is now that he's got push email and that he loves the way a little red light flashes on his Blackberry whenever a new email arrives. Which is rather sad, really. Man should be master of the machine, rather than having his entire life and timetable determined by incoming missives, the vast majority of which could easily be fielded a few minutes later, without any discernable detriment to your life and work.

Perhaps you like the idea of having email waiting for you without having to wait while it's collected? Look in your smartphone/mail software manual, there's a good chance your mail app can collect email automatically at regular intervals.

Does all this sound a little one-sided? Why not comment below and have your say?

Steve Litchfield
http://3lib.ukonline.co.uk/

[langdona]

It may sound one sided but I agree with it 100%

I want to check for new mail as and when I want to.

I dont want push email and I certainly wont pay for it.

[SwitchBlade]

When Orange started offering SMS alerts to let me know e-mail has arrived, I jumped on the bandwagon, at the time I recieved a fair amount of e-mail and some of it was "important" enough for me to want to know that it's arrived. This service only told me who mailed and the subject and cost me nothing. I then had the option of dial up with my 9210 to collect the mail, grab a nearby PC and check my webmail or wait till I got home to PoP3 it. Unfortunately with the world of spam that makes it's way to inboxes daily this has now become more of a hinderance service than anything else somedays with almost 100 spams arriving. Why anyone would want the e-mail directed to their device now is beyond me, I'm glad that the service I use is not available to transfer to my new number (I can't even disable it on my old one, all record of it has vanished).

I'll either wait until I get round to it, or if it's really important I can either be called or a simple text saying "check your mail, it's too big to text" is enough.

This post does not make any sense to me. I think push email is more logical than pulling emails at leisure.. At my leisure I do not want to spend time in pulling emails.. rather, I would spend that time in reading those. I carry Blackberry and find it convinient and it does not force me to read every email I received then and there. I can do whatever I want assured that I won't be missing any mails and I can read them whenever want to... So.. Push e-mail is the thing for me atleast. I also have PPC device which i use it with IBM websphere for my emails and other applications.. but I love that device more fore its richness and I find it very inconvinient to pull emails ... and specially very frustrating when you keep trying for more than once to pull all your emails..

[slitchfield]

Originally Posted by Sands

This post does not make any sense to me. I think push email is more logical than pulling emails at leisure.. At my leisure I do not want to spend time in pulling emails.. rather, I would spend that time in reading those. I carry Blackberry and find it convinient and it does not force me to read every email I received then and there.

Fair point. For those with push already installed and working, with a non-intrusive alert system, you'll save a bit of time every day.

What I was objecting to was the way marketeers are trying to kid us that the old way of email is not much cop and that we all should really have push email instead, buying into their expensive software systems....

Steve Litchfield

[TANKERx]

I agree with the original post 110%

Pulling E-Mail is the last bit of common sense in IT (or one of the last bits). I don;t want to postman to come into my bedroom and wake me up when he delivers my mail, so I don't want to be interrupted by e-mails all the time.

SMS (especially SMS with Delivery Reports - Thank you O2 for not providing them, and I'm not being sarcastic) leaves the sender with an expectancy of an instant reply because hell, what are they doing if they haven't replied!? They must have read it by now!? Are they ignoring me? On the receiving end, I feel I must respond to an SMS fairly quickly for those reasons.

The argument for Push E-mail providing E-mail to read without having to wait for it to download is fair, but that's kind of sorted with the whole 'Download headers Only' options because I don;t want to download spam.

With E-mail, I feel I have time to breathe and think about my reply simply because it's not instant. We live in a world where everything is supposed to be instant, but I believe that human beings are not instant creatures. Our nature (whether by evolution or design) is to wait for things to move, grow, develop or even to simply become. I think that this instant everything is taking away our humanity!

Ok, I'm going to shut up now.

Good article. Thanks.

[dhitchman]

I like push email. I am far too lazy and preoccupied with life in general to go looking for email.
That to me is a bit like going to the post office to get my letters, I prefer them to come through my letterbox.

Mind you, I can understand the desire to have it optional, perhaps even to be able to block this feature overnight or during meetings.

[Stuntman]

Originally Posted by dhitchman

I like push email. I am far too lazy and preoccupied with life in general to go looking for email.
That to me is a bit like going to the post office to get my letters, I prefer them to come through my letterbox.

Mind you, I can understand the desire to have it optional, perhaps even to be able to block this feature overnight or during meetings.

I also really like push email. I like to know that I have email even if I decide to check it later. I don't want to have to manually check to see if I have email at various times of the day and find out I don't have any.

On my phone, I am able to deactivate the push email. I do not use this feature as it takes too much effort toggle between online and offline mode. I also do not bother with the time of day controller as my sleep times may vary due to days off, personal activities or holidays.

[Dionisij1984]

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[Mymnimmiple6]

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[appeame09]

Sad that it had to come to this, but congratulations on being able to track the culprit down. Perhaps your efforts will deter at least some further tampering by others down the line.

On a personal note, Im happy that Mazzurbaf has apparently given up posting constant notes trying to sell Microsoft I assume pirated software in my own forum.