Beware of mobile phone sellers offering to fulfil your dreams.

I have recently spoken to a few of our customers who have been persuaded to buy expensive mobile phones with a view to being able to send and receive emails.  A lot of these phones come with some ambitious promises.   

The ‘utopian scenario’ is that of being able to work from home, or anywhere the fancy takes us.  The reality is, as usual, that there is a cost attached and that the result is often far from the one of your dreams.   There are a number of pitfalls for the unwary and I’ll try to deal with them step by step. If you don’t wish to read further then there is one solution – the Blackberry.  This requires an Exchange server on site, and an additional software package called a BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) which synchronises your PC and Blackberry.  This will work in the utopian fashion but at a cost.  If your phone vendor is offering something else then read on. 

Think how your email gets to your desktop.  Your PC has to collect its mail from somewhere; which in a small company will be your Internet Service Provider (ISP) who lets your PC collect mail using a POP3 account – don’t worry about the name, it’s just technical stuff.  In a slightly larger company you will have a mail server on site that collects the mail from the ISP first (and then your PC interacts with your mail server). 

Now back to the phone scenario.  Most modern mobiles can access the Internet in some way and can be set up to access an email server connected to the Internet.   

The problem is that if you download the emails to your phone then they aren’t on your PC – and if they are downloaded to your PC they aren’t on your phone.  That’s an easy one – get mail forwarding set up (either by your ISP or by changing the settings on your in-house mail server. 

Now the problem is that you have two copies of emails to deal with.  If you are out of the office you can deal with the emails on your phone and delete them or reply to them (the ‘reply from’ is another problem altogether).  When you get back to the office all the emails you deleted from your phone will still be there on your PC. 

Alternatively you could be working in the office and dealing with your emails.  When you go out, all the emails will still be there on your phone. – it’s hardly the ideal situation.  You could just set up email forwarding on your PC but then you have to remember to activate it every time you go out. 

So! We need just one copy of the emails to be in existence.  Let’s imagine they are on your PC.  You could connect to it using a laptop computer and work remotely – viewing the emails and deleting them as you need.  But it’s difficult to use a phone as a laptop.

We need an email account that we can use from a PC or a phone.  Most ISPs offer a webmail system where you can look at your emails using a web browser – Internet Explorer or similar.  Now you can look at your emails using a PC or via the web browser on your phone.  If your company uses an Exchange server then that can be set up for webmail also.

It isn’t the solution your telephone seller talked you into at the start of this article.  So avoid expensive overkill solutions. If you need some advice then talk to us – an ordinary voice phone will do for that ;-).