Is push email really useful?

The holy grail of email seems to be push email where you instantly get your new email as it arrives. For years which my NotifyMail program, I basically had this as well on my desktop, but not on mobile devices. With IMAP idle, NotifyMail is obsolete for the desktop, but push email still seems the rage on handheld devices as everyone wants to be like RIM with the BlackBerry. I didn’t think much of this until last week when I saw someone say that the iPhone can’t be an enterprise device because it doesn’t have push email and you can only have it check email automatically every 15 minutes. To that, I respond, so what? Is email all that important that I have to get messages instantly? Of course not, if something is all that important, people can get me with SMS, IM, or can you believe it, the phone. Why does everyone think that push email (and for that matter constant connectivity) is the only way to work? I think that this causes too much stress and is not needed.

I’m sure people will argue with me that they must be in touch all the time and have to get email anywhere and everywhere, but I’d prefer not to have my life run by a little box.

4 Replies to “Is push email really useful?”

  1. I guess it depends on what business you’re talking about. I guess my point is that staying connected all the time isn’t necessary for most business people. I like my iPhone over every other device I’ve had including BlackBerries, hiptop, and Palm devices.

  2. Well, I know this thread is a little old, but I just discovered the worst thing about Push Email……..SPAM! I leave my iPhone on at night and when I woke the other Friday morning, lo-and-behold my iPhone was dead. My ISP had stuffed up their spam filters and there was over 500 spam messages trickling thru to my iPhone. Think I’ll be using Fetch from now on!

  3. Your ISP needs better spam filters. I use Google Apps for Your Domain for home and rarely get spam. We use Zimbra at work and I rarely get spam, as well.

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