The Hindu : Front Page : Pushmail service coming soon

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Sunday, Jun 29, 2008
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Pushmail service coming soon

Anand Parthasarathy

You can read and reply to your e-mails on basic mobile phones

— Photo: NetCore and TeleFlip resources

Kill Blackberry envy! Ordinary phones can soon access e-mails.

Bangalore: It’s called Blackberry envy — and it afflicts many mobile phone users, who see owners of the iconic smart device constantly checking and responding to their e-mails, which are pushed to their device ‘in real time.’

Such a service doesn’t come cheap of course — any thing from Rs.750 to Rs.2,000 a month in special charges. Those with other ‘smart phones’ with Internet access, also command similar services. But the rest of us, owners of basic Rs.2,000 voice-and-SMS phones, have no way to access while on the move — the e-mails that might be lying in our PC in-boxes at home or in the office.

That is all set to change: Pushmail is here. Simply put, this means “pushing” your e-mail to your mobile phone in text format rather than waiting for you to ‘pull’ it into your PC or laptop by using an e-mail service.

The Mumbai-based NetCore Solutions recently launched a service called Emergic mail2sms which promises to forward e-mail from one’s e-mail inbox to any mobile phone as an SMS message, with the option to reply.

One can decide to receive all e-mails — or just the ones from selected senders. While normal text messages are restricted to 150 characters, the pushed mails can be up to 480 characters, after which they are truncated. A trial subscription is offered at the website of the company (http://m3m.in/). Abroad, this is often a free service in its basic form: Momail.com and Teleflip.com are two choices in the U.S. and Europe. At the recent CommunicAsia show in Singapore, Yahoo unveiled its own e-mail-to-mobile initiative which allows users to have their Yahoomail copied as text messages to their mobile phones, with the option of sending brief replies.

Manish Dalal, Yahoo’s Senior Director for Converged Life initiatives, told The Hindu that the service would be offered very soon in India, not directly to the user, but by leading Indian cellular providers with whom Yahoo is already talking. The latter would decide whether to offer the service free within a value-added bundle or make a small monthly charge. In any event, it’s time to stop envying Blackberry owners as we get set to join the mobile mail-checking club on ‘janata’ handsets!

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