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/