A few things I learned today about BlackBerry Internet Service 2.0
by Volker Weber
Most of my knowledge about BIS was from the old version 1.8. Here are a few things I learned today:
- You no longer have to create a mailbox on the service. Bye bye @mobileemail.vodafone.de.
- BIS will poll your IMAP or POP3 server every 15 minutes for new mail. That is quite a long time, however if it finds mail, it returns every 3 minutes. If it did not find new mails three times in a row, it goes back to the 15 minutes schedule.
- Some providers do not let you check mails every 3 minutes. RIM has adjusted for that and only polls those servers every 5 minutes as needed, for instance.
- Using an IMAP server is very beneficial, since BIS will exchange unread/read marks with the server. If your read your message on the BlackBerry it will be marked read on your PC, much like with BES.
- If you use a GMail or a Yahoo Mail account, you will get your mail almost immediately, since Google and Yahoo ping RIM when new mail arrives. I have at most a 2 second lag.*
- RIM will work with other leading mail providers to enable them to ping when new mail arrives. It is a much better deal for the mail providers if they can ping RIM instead of being polled by them.
Sounds nice, doesn't it? Unfortunately RIM does not seem to have a plan to enable you to build the same thing. So, if you are running your own IMAP server, you will not be able to ping RIM. I think it would be awfully nice, if RIM would talk to people from Scalix, OpenExchange, Collax and the like to enable this service. It would open new markets beyond Domino, Exchange and Groupwise. Next stop: SyncML. ;-)
*) I have now changed my setup to send a copy of my inbound mail at the ISP to gmail.com without going through my server. It will be interesting so see how GMail will handle the spam I am receiving.
Comments
Question from a SmartPhone virgin. I'm considering getting myself a Nokia E70 Device (IBM provides a SIM card with Edge/UMTS/WCDMA, 3G+ support). Nokia is supposed to support the blackberry connect software. So given the fact that IBM provides blackberry support for Notes/Sametime, is getting a blackberry compatible phone such as the Nokia E70 pretty much the same as getting a real blackberry ? Or is there any tradeoff when picking a Nokia vs the real deal ? Thanks in adv for your (and/or your reader's )feedback.
It is not the same thing, but it comes close. BBC often will not allow you to sync all PIM data over the air. Since I have not tried the E70, I cannot tell.
The biggest difference is speed. An 8700 flies rings around any Series 60 phone. If you can hold off another three month, you will get the successor to the 8700, which is the phone you really want.
>>BIS will poll your IMAP or POP3 server every 15 minutes for new mail. That is quite a long time, however if it finds mail, it returns every 3 minutes. If it did not find new mails three times in a row, it goes back to the 15 minutes schedule.>>
That's a long time far away from the original idea RIM had started. That's the even worser than my current use of the treo with a connection interval of 5 minutes (from 8 - 18 and later every 10 minutes).
