I have been using the standard Windows Mobile IMAP-mail client on our company Lotus Notes server for about a year now, without any problems. So without any hesitation I advised two colleagues of mine to use an I-Mate K-Jam for downloading their mail. They saw how i used it, loved the idea of reading their mail on the road and decided they wanted it as well. Little did i know that IMAP on a Windows Mobile device also has its limitations.

Mail has become a vital part of business communications. As some reseach in the Netherlands has shown, a huge percentage, around 32%, of all customer and collegial contact is through e-mail (see the original research by Ernst and Young). According this research, about 55% of the interviewed owned a mobile device that could be used for browsing the web or reading their mail. From the owners of these internet-ready devices, about 39% actually used the e-mail function of their device. So a lot of people actually want mobile e-mail.

In my own business life, about 80% of all customer-contacts is dealt with trough e-mail. Although it is convenient for me to be able to be less bothered with a continuous flow of phone calls, it also has its downside: it generates a flood of mails to your inbox that at some point in time has to be dealt with. When you stay in the office all day, it is not much of a problem. It does tend to become a problem when I'm away from my office for longer periods of time: you have a backlog with some mails being important. So in the end you end up with reading your mail when you come home. For me, it is quite a strain on your family life and your evening's rest, when you have to go through all these mails in the evening. Another disadvantage is that you can not call people in order to resort some issue that pops up in the mail. So dealing with company mail in the evening actually is not a real option when you are away much.

My solution is using a PocketPC for reading my mail. I use an I-Mate JasJar to pick up my mail when I'm in meetings or waiting for something. It absolutely thrills me to be able to read mail when I decide it is time to read my e-mail. When I’m on the move or in a less interesting meeting I easily pick up my device and see if I can answer my e-mail. Research indicates that mobile e-mail could save around 22 minutes a week. For me, it is a good feeling to know that have dealt with most of the important e-mails during the day when i had some lost time, instead of having to deal with them in the evening when rather spent some time with my family and friends.

Until recently, I was the only one in our company thinking like that. Many of my colleagues just read their e-mail in the evening at home. They are not the only ones doing this, according to research, a frightening 82% of employees do this as well. But since a few weeks, some of my colleagues also bought a Windows Mobile device: the I-mate K-Jam. This device is not only small but also very powerful and it is extremely popular because this combination. One of the main reasons for my colleagues to buy this device is the possibility to read their mail during breaks in meetings or when they are on their way to something: they too were tired of having to catch up with their mail in the evening after a long day of hard work. They really wanted to remove some of the struggle they had almost every evening and do something more fun with their evenings.

Our company mail-systems are based on IMAP: our IT department, like many IT departments, knows that allowing POP3 introduces big risks in losing mail. This can be either in one of the many synchronizations to clients or by losing the device which stores the mail altogether. Therefore we have to use regular IMAP-functionality of the Windows Mobile mail client: Pocket Outlook. According to the specifications of Windows Mobile, it should work. I am using this combination for a year now, so i was pretty confident that it would be a solution without any problems. I am a very technocratic user of e-mail: all mail that is not new should not be on the server. How little did I know about the totally different approaches of my colleagues for reading e-mail and the problems they cause in use on a mobile device...

Microsoft's implementation of the IMAP protocol isn't one of the best, the general impression is that the POP implementation has had a lot more attention. My colleague found out the hard way. He started downloading the messages in his inbox, but the downloading did not complete. It simply stopped halfway. Upon closer investigation, we discovered something: the client tried to download his entire inbox, despite the setting to limit the view only to the mails received in the last three days. Pocket Outlook downloaded them anyway. Downloading his entire mailbox became problematic, since his mailbox contained more than 6000 messages and the mobile device simply could not deal with the volume of the mailbox: it took about two hours before the device ran out of the memory and hung itself. So handling one big inbox through IMAP is not really an option, even with limiting the view severely.

This colleague believed in the GMail way: don't organize, just store everything in one giant mailbox and search through them if you need something specific. This could actually be one of the most productive ways of handling mail. According to some, the need to organize e-mail in folders is actually legacy from the paper-age and that searching through e-mail now takes less time than organizing every mail into a folder. According to research performed by StorageTek, an average employee spends about 10 hours a month organizing his messages, and 52 minutes a month in order to finding them back again. They did the math and concluded it was cheaper to add more storage space than to continue to force people to stay within their mailbox quota. According to research performed by Osterman (quoted by CA), the size of the individual mailbox is tremendous: 41% of the users have a mailbox bigger than 200Mb. So my colleague is not an exotic case, it could very well reflect the way most people deal with their mail.

Another colleague of mine did invest in organizing his mailbox. He organized his mail into many different folders. Unlike me, he did this on the central server like any sane person would. Using the central mail server retains the normal e-mail usage-experience and there is also a financial upside on storing mail on the server: according to both Computer Associates and StorageTek storing e-mail on other servers (by using .pst files or a file system) is a much more expensive storage solution. But the standard mail client can not cope with a multitude of folders, even when you are only synchronizing the incoming mailbox. Although it does work nicely when using Wireless LAN, it becomes disfunctional on slower connection media. When it is connecting through GPRS, the server simply times out on the synchronization of the folders. Unfortunately, this is the primary way of connecting to the server since nationwide coverage of Wireless LAN is still far away. He too ended up with a disfunctional e-mail solution.

Although the reasons are quite different, both problems result in a disfunctional e-mail solution. No matter how you organize your mail on the server (either in one mailbox or in many small folders), the client cannot handle the volume you are trying to access. Sadly, this e-mail function is the main reason my colleagues actually bought the device in the first place. If it was because of abnormal use of the Pocket Outlook client (or the server), then it would not have been such a big deal. But, as we have shown, it isn't that abnormal use of a mailbox. My conclusion is that the standard IMAP implementation of Pocket Outlook is not up to real business use. It simply could not handle the real business use of accessing a huge mail account through IMAP.

It is amazing that a product that is clearly positioned for a business market fails in such a way when it is put to the test. This presents two options:

1. Limit the number of e-mails on the server in order to keep using the regular client, basically introducing extra costs on the server support side (as the articles by Computer Associates and StorageTek suggest), less flexible access to e-mail and more risks of losing information. This probably is not a solution welcomed by many organizations and end-users.
2. Switch to an alternative e-mail client, allowing you to use the mail like you used to. This basically duplicates functionality on the device and introduces the need to install and support the application.

My personal opinion is that it is shameful to conclude that a device aiming for business use is not up to its task by default. With Lotus Notes still having a market share of 35% (many of them using IMAP) and many small companies use open source IMAP server there, is a huge group of business users in need for a serious IMAP client. In order to offer a real-life solution for real business applications on non-Microsoft mail environments, this client has to improve to make a serious offer.