Addicted to Uptime

Spirit Connect’s received quite a few enquires for things like push email via Hosted Exchange. We’ve attempted to sell Hosted Exchange in a few different ways by outsourcing this function to a service provider and reselling it. This was never popular with customers, likely due to per mailbox pricing, so we never setup our own platform to sell this. To date we only ever sold 4 mailboxes!

However you can use “Push Email” with our services if you have a Windows Mobile Smartphone. Smart phones are PDA’s like HTC, Palm Treo, and Jas Jams, just to name a few.

What a lot of customers haven’t realized is our Linux servers support IMAP IDEL this means you can use programs like FlexMail 2007 which you install via ActiveSync from your desktop to your Windows Mobile and set this as the default mail program instead of Microsoft Outlook on your mobile, you than use FlexMail 2007 to collect your email via IMAP.

What is Push Email?
Push Email requires that your phone keeps a constant data connection open to the network when using this function of your phone; indications from research, I’ve done online seem to indicate that using push email uses less batter life than using pull email (i.e scheduling your phone to connect every 10 minutes and poll your account and download anything that is new). However due to being always connected to the network; it’s a really good idea to have a 100mb data plan as a very minimum when using push email.

We’d recommend against using the Three Network due to the massive costs of data while roaming on the Telstra GSM network.

Our setup when we did testing for 5 days

Phone: Palm Treo 750v
OS: Windows Mobile 6
Carrier: Vodafone
Plan: $79 Business Cap

My Settings

Outlook 2003 is configured to download all my mail to my work station but is configured to leave mail on the server and remove it after 10 days. I set this up so IMAP doesn’t time out on large mailboxes. This means I get mail on my desktop and phone at about the same time. The notification of mail on my Treo seems to reach me in approx 1-4 minutes when I send tests from Gmail which is more than acceptable. On my Treo I have IMAP running over SSL with secure authentication and I also use our SMTP server for sending mail which is required by our anti-spam software.

Limitations of this compared to Microsoft Exchange

Update of contacts and appointments over “the air” aren’t possible; you’ll need to plug your phone into your desktop to sync with Outlook. Most other Exchange functions are limited to Microsoft Exchange.

Push email however works quite well!

Just something to consider (person opinion here – not an official one)

Our Vodafone plan is out of contract in March and my unlocked Treo is only 4 months old; so I’m looking to move to the Optus $49 Business Cap plan + $39.99/mo for 2GB data bolt on. I’m not 100% sure if this available but indications on various web forums seem to indicate that if you push the envelope hard enough with Optus they’ll give you this. You just need to find the right customer service rep to set this up for you and it must be a business plan or business cap.

Vodafone flat out will refuse any similar request, as they are more interesting in selling their expensive data plans for PDA access. Changing to Optus would save us quite a bit in data charges as Vodafone charge $1 for 5 minutes of Internet data access; being connected all day only transferring less than 1-5Mb when not downloading any mail would easily cost me $144 a day ($12/hr x 12 hrs usage).

I receive aprox 300 emails a day (about 50 from our billing system - which require review daily) to my personal email address this doesn’t include email from our suppliers, mail lists etc which come in via a different account and Outlook handles that. I’d strongly recommend if customers are looking at using something like this they have a decent data plan setup with their carrier or they could potentially be up for thousands of dollars in data fees.