Doing business 20 years ago must have been a much more sedate affair.
Apart from the great suit fashions that 1989 businessmen enjoyed, they could also have long liquid lunches safe in the knowledge that their work stayed at work.
Mobile phones were new and expensive (so new that it would be four years before text messaging was introduced). Email didn’t really exist outside of universities and very early adopters, and wouldn’t start to become available to most of us until the mid 1990s.
How different things are now. Email is so widespread that it is the dominant method of daily communication for many people. There can be very few businesses left that don’t use email in same way, even if only a Hotmail or Yahoo! address.
Change has been rapid. And in the last few years there has been more rapid development, as email has moved out of desktop computers and into mobile devices.
Mobile technology driving communications
Mobile technology development has focused on making it easy for you to communicate exactly the way you want to, no matter where you are or what you are doing.
But that ease of communication has added a greater expectation of speed from customers. These days they expect business contacts to respond to email as quickly as they return phone calls.
Unless your business keeps you in the office all day, you need to access email on the move. It’s not just a bind; you’ll find the added advantage that you can use odd moments during the day, such as 10 minutes before a sales appointment, to clear new email messages.
Here is Bytestart’s guide to the mobile email options open to you:
Push email
This is the most convenient way to get email on the move. It’s called push email, because as soon as someone sends an email to you, it is automatically “pushed” to your mobile device.
If you delete that email or reply to it, the changes are automatically synchronised with your main email on your computer. There’s no need to connect to anything or push any buttons; it’s all done automatically. Anything that doesn’t require you to think about what you are doing is a bonus!
The best known mobile device for push email is the BlackBerry (although most devices now offer some kind of push email). While the latest BlackBerrys are superphones with all the features you’d expect, the devices started in 2002 primarily for email on the move.
You can use the BlackBerry service to access virtually any kind of email account, from corporate emails sent by your business’s Exchange server (the same one that runs Outlook), to emails from webmail services like Gmail.
Get email
If the emails aren’t being pushed to your device, your device has to go and get them. Many Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) work in this way. At regular intervals, the device will connect to the email server and download your new emails.
This method works with all email accounts, and is a suitable way to access different email accounts from one device. We recommend you use the email format IMAP rather than POP3. IMAP synchronises all changes made to your emails on the move, whereas POP3 only delivers a copy of emails to your mobile device (i.e. if you delete an email on your device, it won’t copy the change back to your computer).
Browse to your email
The third way to access email on the move is to browse to it using your device’s web browser. All Microsoft Outlook emails can be accessed this way (at https://yourmailserveraddress/oma), plus the usual webmail services. Google has released a number of specific mobile applications for its popular Gmail service, which provide a better way to access Gmails on the move.
Use a laptop
BlackBerrys and PDAs get their emails using the mobile phone networks’ GPRS signal. The other option for you to get email on the move is to use a laptop and connect to the internet. Find a public wifi connection somewhere like a cafe, or get a mobile broadband dongle.
Getting email in this way gives you the advantage of using your full sized keyboard and email program, but you lose the convenience of a small device, as anyone trying to use a laptop in the back of a taxi will tell you.
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