Out of the office can mean a couple of hours running errands, having lunch or it could mean away on a business trip.

There are various tools available to help you access email while away from the office.

 These include:-

Internet Cafes, Laptops, PDAs, Smartphones, GPRS, 3G, WiFi Access Points, WebMail and Blackberries

I've tries most of these over the past few years with varying degrees of success. They variously suffer from the problems of:-

Too inconvenient, too heavy, poor battery life, too difficult, too expensive, poor coverage and just won't work.

The system I use now works a treat Rhebus is offering 2 ways for you to have a similar system:-

1 - We'll set the system up on your office server and maintain the system for a month, 6 months or as long as you want us to.

2 - If this isn't possible you can open an account with us to access email on the move using our servers for a monthly fee. This might be a good place to start to evaluate how well the system works for you.

It's important to realise that what you want from an email system is different between sitting in your office using Outlook on a desktop PC and checking email in the back of a cab, in a restaurant, on a train, walking down the street or in a departure lounge. When you're on the move you need to read email to be aware of any new developments, unexpected problems, last minute changes to a meeting time or a new business lead. You want peace of mind that while you're out you don't miss anything important. You may need to make the occasional short reply but normally you can wait until you're back in the office, on your home PC or working on your laptop in the hotel room.

Here's what's required for email on the move:-

1 - The least amount of extra equipment to carry around.

2 - A few day's battery life.

3 - You only receive the important messages. No spam, viruses, large attachments, newsletters etc.

4 - Your desktop email system remains unaffected by mobile email use, i.e. it still collects every email sent to you.

And your mobile device should also pass the Rhebus Mobile Email Test:

Can you hold your email device in one hand, operating it with your thumb and refresh your inbox in 20 seconds (not including message download time)?

I can. Here's the device I use, the Nokia 6320:-

It accesses POP3 and SMTP servers over a GPRS connection.

Details later on in this page

First and foremost it's a mobile phone with no compromises in phone functionality.

It can synchronise Outlook Contacts, Calendar and ToDo lists with my main PC over a Bluetooth connection.

As I now habitually carry a mobile phone I consider this Email on the Move solution to require zero extra equipment.

Is that it? Get a phone that does email?

No - your email also needs processing to:-

1 - Aggressively filter out spam and viruses

2 - Remove attachments and HTML code

3 - Filter out messages of low importance such as newsletters and email from friends

4 - Truncate emails that exceed the maximum length that the phone can handle

5 - Amalgamate emails from different accounts into one mobile mailbox.

Don't worry, all this processing is performed on a COPY of your email. Your full unprocessed emails continue to be received on your main computer email client.

Why Does my Email need all this processing?

You pay for downloading data over GPRS at around £3/megabyte so you need to minimise the data to be downloaded.

You'll be lucky to get a 28kbps connection over GPRS so you want to minimise the time needed to download your messages.

The phone has limited memory for storing downloaded emails.

The phone's email interface means you can't deal will email as efficiently as when using a mouse from within Windows.

But a Blackberry alerts you when a new email has arrived

The next stage is to use SMS text messages to alert you of new emails. An SMS message costs around 10p plus you don't want the Text alert tone going off all the time so a further layer of filtering is required to limit the number of emails texted to you.

The SMS format is limited to 160 characters per message so the standard English of an email is usually converted to the shorthand used by regular SMS texters. This 160 character limit is not a serious drawback as, once alerted, you can check your mobile Inbox in the normal way.

We're still working on a reliable system to send emails as SMS text messages.

FAQs

Q1 - Your system removes all attachments. What if an attachment was an Excel spreadsheet that I needed to view?

A1 - To view a spreadsheet, your mobile device needs to be more sophisticated than my Nokia - something like a Pocket PC. If your device can display spreadsheets it should be able to access your unfiltered inbox to download the attachment.

I haven't seen a PDA that can pass the Rhebus Mobile Email Test.

A Pocket PC comes with a version of Excel but because of the small screen and mouse-less interface, even with skill and patience, it's not nearly as good as using Excel on a regular PC.

My advice is to keep your email-on-the-move device simple - just reading and writing text emails. If an incoming email necessitates some action best performed on a regular PC then keep a laptop close by which can access the Internet through your mobile device.

How Can You Get This System?

Using your own server

If you already have a Windows 2000 or 2003 server or a Small Business Server(SBS) 2000 or 2003 which has a permanent connection to the Internet with a static IP address we can set up an mobile email access system on your equipment. You can still use Exchange or any external email service that you currently use.

Having your own system is more convenient and you can have a finer degree of control over filtering and the system can learn to avoid specific false positives. You can also get a bulk SMS message deal of 7p per message.

Using Our Servers

You can try out this service for a month or two to evaluate whether it's suitable for installing on your own servers, perhaps you don't have a suitable server of your own or you're a private individual.

To set up an account with us you need to either:-

Send us the access details: POP3 server name, username and password of all the accounts you want including. These accounts can include webmail services such as Hotmail, Yahoo and AOL.

OR

Set your in-house server, such as Exchange, to send a copy of all your incoming email to your mobile mailbox on our servers.

It can also play and take videos. It's an MP3 player and has an FM radio

The charge is £7.50/month for a regular account or £12.50 for a managed account plus a one-off setup fee of £12.50.

With managed accounts you get to email the Mobile Administrator details of emails you want whitelisting or blacklisting. Don't send us details of any Spam emails that get through. We just want to know about genuine emails you receive from people and organisations you regularly deal with that are being filtered out as Spam or that you don't want to receive on your mobile device. You also get this facility included for the first month with a regular account.

Our servers use the same rules to determine Spam for all accounts so , as one person's Spam can be another's genuine email, Spam detection is handled centrally. We set our spam filter threshold so that there may be the occasional false positive but the number of spam emails that get through is very low.

You also have access to your mobile inbox from your Desktop email client via IMAP so that you can empty it of all the email you have already dealt with. 3 day old emails in the mobile inbox are automatically deleted at 1.00am each day.

We offer both regular and secure access to our servers via the POP3, SMTP, and IMAP poprotocols. With secure access a digital certificate is used at our end to encrypt the communication channel so that passwords and the contents of emails can't be viewed by anyone monitoring your connection.

There is no limit to the size of your mobile inbox or the number of emails it can receive.

SPAM TERMS
False Positive - a genuine email falsely classified as spam
White List - A list of senders whose emails are always considered genuine.
Black List - A list of senders whose emails are always considered to be Spam