Today I want to discuss push email. Since the day we started hyping the millenium bug, we all become aware of computers like never before. That was some fancy advertising. Even my semi-literate grandmother (God rest her soul in peace) once asked me about it. It all came to pass without a single blip on a monitor!
Since then every self respecting kenyan has registered for an email address (because it is free, of course!). Whether it is active or not is a story for another day.
The good thing about email is that your mail is delivered within minutes to any destination in the world. Not just that, with instant messaging you can actually chat to someone in real time. It gets even better when you use a social networking site like facebook where you can post a comment and your friends can view them and post their own comments as well.
But perhaps the best thing that has happened is the mobile internet. For a modest amount you can get a wap-enabled phone. It is now possible to access most websites on your phone. You can read newspapers, check university websites, download music, pictures and videos and best of all access your email. Now you do not have to travel to a cyber cafe to check your mail.
Perhaps the biggest hindrance to people using email is that you have to go to a cyber cafe to access it. This has been a major obstacle until now.
However, even with email access on your phone you still have to open the phone browser and log in which most people do not remember to do. The result is email accounts with 256 unread messages! How on earth do you go through all these? Imagine that number of letters in your post office box!
Luckily there is now a solution to all this. Push email.
If you have a smartphone or one of the more advanced phones such as the Sony Ericsson K810i or Nokia N and E series or the dazzling Nokia 5800 you can setup push email and assign a ringtone to your account. Push email gives you an always-on connection so that your phone notifies you when you have a new message, just like an SMS! You can then read the message and respond to it at once right on your phone. You can even attach a picture that you took with your phone camera to the reply! How cool is that?
Just one thing though, currently push email only works as a free service with gmail accounts (negligible operator charges apply). Yahoo! offers this as a premium service and this is a standard offer on all blackberry smartphones.
The beauty of it all is that sending an email from your phone will cost you less than 50cts!
In these tough economic times a good quality phone is not just a fashion statement. It can save you alot of money and time especially when using a 3G network (it will drain your battery though so turn it off when you are done). In kenya 3G is available on Safaricom and Orange and by next year it will be available on Zain as well.
To setup push email simply go to your phone's message menu and change your email settings to:
- Address: your full email address i.e *****@gmail.com
Connection type: IMAP4-
Incoming server: imap.gmail.com
Username: *****@gmail.com-
Password: your email password -
Outgoing server: smtp.gmail.com -
Check interval: off
Push email: on
Encryption: incoming server TLS/SSL-
Incoming port: 993 -
Outgoing port: 465 -
GPRS APN: your internet profile (e.g Safaricom internet)
Email alert: choose a ringtone.
These settings work fine on my Sony Ericsson K810i. I am still trying to figure out where the problem is on my K750i, anybody know?
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