Push e-mail seems to have become the holy grail of mobile computing. In the US, Blackberry is a huge success, and now other players in the mobile arena see it as the feature to have as well. Regardless if we want it, new devices will be equiped with push e-mail. But is it desirable to have push e-mail in the first place? And what is the business value of push e-mail? In this article we try to address these questions.

Mobile e-mail is a big business driver for mobile devices. Many people want it. In fact, according to a recent study 37% uses his/her mobile phone to retrieve e-mail while according to other studies, around 32% of the people use or want to use mobile e-mail. So on average around 35% of all people want mobile e-mail. Looking at executives, the number even increases to 76%. Main reason is that it allows people to deal with their mail when they have time and saves time in moments that are important to them.

The next step, according to the industry, is push e-mail. This is a service that is highly desired by providers to supply to users. Blackberry has become very big with this push e-mail concept, and now both Microsoft and Nokia are eager to move in this market as well. Basically they weill have to in order to level the playing field. Some consumers want it badly as well (see here and here), and they are willing to switch e-mail providers in order to get it. But why do suppliers offer it to us? Is it such a desireable feature to start with? And what are the consequences? Does it make sense from a technological point of view and from a social viewpoint?

The popularity of push e-mail

One of the drivers behind the introduction of push e-mail is the huge success of Blackberry in the US. We do have to realize that from a historical viewpoint there was a big split between Europe/Asia and the US in terms of needs of direct text communication that also provides an explanation for the marketshare of RIM. Where in the US the Blackberry introduced text services by introducing dedicated mobile devices, the GSM collective introduced SMS in Europe and Asia. SMS can be sent directly from GSM to GSM and although it is limited to 160 characters, it was very usable as long as the sender was short and to the point. With GSM having an almost 90% market penetration in Europe and Asia, the need for dedicated text messaging solutions was limited. Actually, SMS has been a big business driver for youngsters and SMS has become an accepted business tool. In the US, Blackberry filled that niche of text messaging, resulting in huge market shares. The next arising need was mobile e-mail. The GSM collective responded by introducing GPRS: it allowed connection to the internet, easily opening normal e-mail communication on all kinds of mobile devices. In the US, Blackberry filed that niche by allowing mobile e-mail through their proprietary protocols. So the development of mobile e-mail is different on both continents, resulting in entirely different market shares. Although the US is adapting the GSM standard rapidly as well, allowing direct text messaging through SMS and e-mail through GPRS, BlackBerry still holds a big marketshare.

Looking at the market penetration, Blackberry's market share is big in the US, although it is falling. Many explanations of this success are based on the idea that push-email is the only differentiator between Blackberry and other competitive products. Only few explanations are based on other perspectives on the success of BlackBerry, like the usability of the device or the fact that it is marketed primarily as a mobile e-mail solution. Good usability, leading to low defection rates, combined with a historically big marketshare can also provide a good rationale for the current marketshare of BlackBerry.

Big players like Microsoft and Nokia want RIMs marketshare, regardless of historical or usablity advantage from RIM. Instead of improving the overall usability of the devices they provide, they atacked on a rather technical point: they stepped into the market of push e-mail as well. Microsoft did by extending Microsoft Exchange 2003 and updating Windows Mobile 5 to allow push e-mail. Nokia entered the market by acquiring Intellisync and its general middleware and client technology. According to estimates, there are roughly 11 million e-mail addicts in the world, so there is a lot of market potential out there wanting this solution for its speed. So from a supplier's viewpoint it is clear why they want to offer this technology, but is it something we want/need from a functional perspective?

Push e-mail from a technical perspective

As many people will confirm, not every technical change means that it is an improvement. Push e-mail could very well be one of these cases. Push e-mail promises delivery of e-mail to the mobile device as soon as it is delivered to the mail server. But internet and e-mail are not designed for reliable and speedy delivery of content and e-mail: it is designed for getting there in some time, or not. Push e-mail might be pushing the envelope of mail communication a bit too far.

Practically, one could see push e-mail like adding a jet engine to a wheelchair for the elderly. It initially sounds like a good idea, making something that is slow a bit faster, but in reality it does not work out as good as you would hope it would be. You try to supercharge an inherently slow object and basically perform a sub-optimization that does not matter in the duration of the total process. Where it is nice that your mail is delivered directly to your mobile device, one should remember that all kinds of disasters can happen to that same mail when it is outside the safe perimeters of a company domain. So the delivery time for the last hop (from your mail server to your mobile e-mail client) gets a turboboost, but it is agonizing slow in moving from the sender's box to your mailserver.

The internet itself is not a great medium to transport data: it is designed to be robust, but it does not care about individual blocks of data being slow or even being lost in the process. It is not uncommon for parts of data to travel around the world in order to end up with your neighbor. E-mail itself is notoriously unreliable as well: e-mail can get lost, it can hang about on SMTP servers for days, it could end up in a SPAM filter or could be bounced for hundreds of reasons (where mailbox quota and message size are the most notorious).

Important e-mail does indeed get lost because of SPAM filters, having devastating effects. And if it doesn't get lost, it might be severely delayed on route to your mailserver. A recent study among Dutch e-mail providers has shown that a significant part of e-mail is delayed by days. It shows the following things:

• e-mail indeed got lost completely (this is even without any SPAM filters active!)
• about 2% of all e-mail was really delayed: it took more than 90 seconds to arrive. Of these delayed e-mails:
• a third of them was delayed for more than hour 
• the average delivery time was 5½ hours!
• 13% was delayed for more than a day

So from a technical point of view, speeding up the delivery process a few minutes might not matter at all, especially if the mail will take some days to be delivered.

Push e-mail heavily relies on a constant connection with the internet, which is not a good thing anyway. The wireless internet connection can easily become blocked, simply disabling the push e-mail functionality without you noticing it. Also, looking from a data usage and battery life point of view, push e-mail might not be the best solution around. At the geekzone, some tests have been conducted in real life to determine the level of data usage (without any mails to transport), with the following results:

A normal “poll“ for mail on a POP takes about 3Kb. So for the amount of data usage that a default Push e-mail configuration uses, you can check your mail every 10 minutes as well, which can be quite effective as well, especially when one realizes that an e-mail needs some time to travel from sender to receiving e-mail server in the first place (as described above).

So, from a technical point of view, push e-mail does not give you much. It will not speed up your communication much since mail is already a slow medium when it is outside the trusted environment of your company. For the same costs in data transport and even a slightly better battery life, you can connect to your mail server every 10 minutes (if you want to). But most of all, pushing e-mail will not have a significant improvement upon the delivery of your e-mail.

Push e-mail from a social perspective

The central assumption of push e-mail is that life becomes productive and people can respond more promptly when they have push e-mail, leading to a more pleasant work environment. Apparently those 10 minutes waiting for e-mail seem to matter.  The need for mobile text messaging seems to be almost universal, but seeing the different solutions (both SMS and e-mail) it does make one wonder why we need push e-mail in the first place. Not from a technically point of view, but from a social point of view. The "need for speedy communication" is an often used reason to use push e-mail, but besides the previously mentioned technical reasons it minimally frustrates this promise, one should wonder if e-mail would be the best channel for speedy communication in the first place. Looking at the practical applications of (push) e-mail, a completely different picture arises.

What would we send with such a rush anyway? Let's face it; e-mail has become the trashcan of our workplace. We use it to dump our problems in it and ship it to a place we rather forget. Push e-mail just gives us another excuse to say the receiving person had plenty of time responding to an e-mail. Senders assume that e-mail is handled in some way. E-mail basically is a fire-and-forget type of communication: you put in a e-mail and if you are lucky, the receiver will react accordingly and will never reply. That makes e-mail the perfect dumpster for annoying problems. Senders typically just dump their problem in an e-mail, without packing their message neatly, not telling you what to do and assume that from that point on it is somebody else's problem. Even when the message could be better communicated through another channel, it still gets dumped in an e-mail just for the convenience of the sender.

This behavior results in huge amounts of mail, an assorted mass of critical and non-critical together. This huge unsorted flood of mail results in saturation effects: in the daily flood of e-mail the receiver just misses that one e-mail that was critical and never will understand that he had to do anything. One should wonder if it is even humanly possible to manage all your desktop e-mail on your mobile device. On the desktop, people are already struggling with the flood of e-mail and hardly can distinguish between high priority mail and low priority mail. Although some argue that it is just a phase in our cognitive development, a lot of people already struggle with the load of e-mail on a desktop, and the number of e-mails are just rising further. Some people are fighting back the flood of e-mail, but it is an uphill battle.

On a mobile device it is worse: you miss the screen size and tooling to organize your mail, triage on the device on e-mail characteristics is nearly impossible. A Windows Mobile device does not show the priority assigned to a mail. Although there are very promising developments in filtering mobile e-mail on the server side, severely limiting the flood of mail, none of them are ready for full production. Basically, there is just no way available to us yet to distinguish critical mail from less important mail on the server side.

Even if one could filter on just the urgent messages, one of the biggest organizational dangers of push e-mail is that people start to assume that you will read e-mail directly and will respond directly accordingly. This is a dangerous assumption. Perhaps that is a strange idea: If your companies' future would depend on it, would you let it depend on the fact that your colleagues read their e-mail on time? E-mail typically is an uncoupled medium: you do not see if, when and how your message is read. There is no way on earth you are going to find out if somebody has received his e-mail, read it, understood it, shares your priority in dealing with the presented situation, plans the appropriate action and has enough commitment to see it through to the end. People could be doing something totally different, could have forgotten the device at home, have a bad connection or are in areas that do not allow the use mobile devices. One can only wonder what would have happened if the following conversation would have taken place through e-mail:

Kirk: Engine room!
Scotty: Scotty here.
Kirk: We'll need all the power you can muster, mister!
Scotty: Don't you worry, Captain. We'll beat those Klingon devils, even if I have to get out and push.
Kirk: I hope it won't come to that, Mr. Scott.

I personally think that if Scotty got notified by an e-mail to increase power, it would have become a very short movie celebrating the victory of Klingon empire. For really serious business, one would expect that people start making phone calls, making sure that the receiving end understands the seriousness of the situation and they would act accordingly. The sad truth is that even these messages get dumped in an e-mail, along with the rest of the flood of messages dealing with insignificant problems, car-lights that stayed on and company parties. There are even some governments who plan to use e-mail during crisis situation and actually create specific infrastructure to do so, totally disregarding the flood of data that will be caused during and shortly after a crisis situation, and the incapability of dealing with them on a mobile device.

The behavior by senders of e-mail has made us, the receivers of e-mail, completely paranoia regarding e-mail: people might get the feeling that they will miss important issues if they do not read their mail constantly. Just because there might be a slim chance that some ignorant sender sends a mail might be critical for us, we start checking our mail constantly, worrying if we did not miss anything that can destroy the planet. In fact, that might be the main reason why e-mail addictions start: the compulsive behavior of checking your mail relieves the fear for missing something that might be important. A good example of this behavior can be seen in this blog-comment:

Sadly, less than 1% of the emails that I receive actually DO fit the category of “super-critical-must-be-dealt-with-now-or-else, but because that number is greater than zero, I do have to check email in the manner you describe to make sure that none of these exist in my inbox.

Looking at some research performed by AOL this is a widespread phenomenon. We are really becoming addicted to e-mail, checking it whenever possible in the most inappropriate places. The same research by AOL shows that the places where people check e-mail are simply ridiculous:

• In bed in their pyjamas (23%)
• In class (12%)
• In a business meeting (8%)
• At a Wi-Fi hotspot, like Starbuck's or McDonald's (6%)
• At the beach or pool (6%)
• In the bathroom (4%)
• While driving (4%)
• In church (1%)

Besides the obvious downside of looking very silly when sending mail from the bathroom, multitasking does have it serious downsides. Although mobile e-mail might make people more effective, the constant dealing with e-mail can have a negative side to people's effectiveness or even might lead to dangerous behavior. Multitasking could really hamper personal effectiveness both in the short and long term. The problem is that people become unable to focus on the task at hand because the continuous (anticipation on) interruptions. People like Steven Covey advise people to control their daily routines in big blocks of focused work instead of being constantly distracted by incoming mail. With normal mobile e-mail you are in control when you receive your e-mail, by using push e-mail, the sender starts to interfere your work-rhythm. It is humanly impossible to do so.

The very nature of push e-mail will stimulate you to keep using e-mail as a medium: it is supposed to be a fast medium and why not respond in a short cryptic e-mail typed on a small keyboard in a waiting line. In many cases there might be a very good reason to switch medium, just for the sake of effectiveness of communication or the richness of communication. In fact, Windows Mobile 5 stimulates you to do so. For known senders it will display the name as link, allowing you direct access to this persons other ways of communication: phone, msn and text messaging.

Some people assume that they will be able to make better decisions while on the road and become more productive. One could seriously question the quality of the decisions people have made while reacting to a brief e-mail while being in the front of the checkout-line with 20 people waiting behind you. Research into decision making under stress has indicated that this is not an isolated perception: decision making is complex and quality of decisions deteriorate rapidly when the stress comes in the form of distracting inputs. One should also consider the social effects on the network of decision makers. Generally, 90% of all problems resolve themselves if you do not pick up your phone: people start thinking on their own and fix it. If you will make that decision for them each time they need one, they will never learn to assess a situation themselves and make their own decisions. If you are not careful, you will have to be involved in every decision in your company, from acquiring companies to the number of red pencils that will be bought. Although a very pleasing thought for some micromanaging managers, the viability of this model should be questioned.

Seeing it from a technical and social point of view, push e-mail can not be used for communicating (high emergency) matters requiring action from the receiving party. Having said that, why would you want use push e-mail in the first place, since the rush of the e-mail cannot be of importance? I guess it is luxury. It is satisfying the thirst for fresh unread e-mail of e-mail addicts, reducing the need to hit the "send/receive" button every minute and having to wait for 10 seconds. However, people wanting to be effective should take matters into their own hands and decide themselves when they want to be interrupted by e-mail.

Is the push concept totally useless for business?

Is push technology all bad, just being fabricated to extract more money from e-mail junkies? Push technology can actually save time, but not in the form of creating a big highspeed pipe of e-mail from the company server to the mobile device of the user. In that sense, it might be a nice gimmick but will not add much business value.

There is a part of the push technology that does help the user to become more productive: it is the push synchronization of appointments. One might wonder why this would save so much time. Well, when people work in a highly dynamic environment where schedules constantly change, like consultants, trial lawyers, medical practitioners etc., it is a good way to have a secretary who manages the calendar completely. In those dynamic environments, the secretary is the only one that can be reached easily, allowing the consultant/lawyer/doctor to be managed on the road without any hassle. When the user systematically just looks ahead one appointment (i.e. customer, trial, patient) he/she will not even notice that the calendar has changed (again). And this happens without much overhead for the user: all modifications to his/hers schedule happen in the background without any need for intervention from the user. This allows the user to concentrate on his work, instead of being interrupted by e-mails and calls and assessing if that has any impact on his current day-planning. And that might be the true business value of push technology.

One of our founding fathers, Ronald, installed a Microsoft Small Business Server for a small law firm. One of their biggest problems was that keeping up with all the trial appointments in a day. That proved quite a challenge since trials are not very firmly planned; we all hope that punctuality is sacrificed in favor of quality, causing a cascade of updates on court appointments with all parties involved: lawyers and judges. Keeping a close tab on all these court appearances is vital but hard as well. This used to be settled by the lawyer calling the secretary, asking what his next appointment would be and what has changed in the mean time. This created a huge overhead on both sides and the risk that one of them could not be reached by clients. By introducing Microsoft Small Business Server and push e-mail, the calendar synchronizes automatically, allowing both to focus on their business, instead of trying to keep up with the dynamics of their work.

It is amazing how much hype is generated around push e-mail, where there is no real added business value. It is just a technocratic show off and its only benefit is that it will provide some stress relief for e-mail addicts. It lacks the exchange of commitments that the richer forms of two-way communication provide us with. The only real thing push e-mail might do for you is that it gives the senders yet another excuse to dump critical messages in the mail, instead of calling you directly, probably making you even more paranoid about e-mail than you are already. Above this, one should seriously question the quality of decisions that people make while responding to such an e-mail. Underneath this whole show the true added value is in some parts that are highly underestimated: it allows for remote and very short-term planning without the tremendous overhead that used to be associated with it, allowing better utilization of very important people.