revjim.net

So yeah. Yesterday, I broke down and bought a Blackberry Pearl which came highly recommended by more people than I can count. While there, I was very tempted by the new Blackberry Curve, which was just released that day. However, the few features it offered didn't warrant the $100 difference in price and I was anxious to try a smaller phone for a change.

So far, I like the Pearl. It's fast, and, after a brief introduction in the way of the Berry, quite easy to use.

My only problem with it, oddly enough, is in the way it handles email, which is, of course, it's most highly regarded feature. Here is my gripe:

In the corporate world, supposedly, this works as I want it to. So, if I was willing to pay an extra $10/mo in service charges, pay for a Blackberry Enterprise Service license, find a server to host it on, and pay for and maintain one of the expensive mail solutions that works with this, I'd have exactly what I want. But, even in the best of circumstance, that works out to an extra $40/mo on top of the existing Blackberry fees just to get features that seem like no-brainers to me.

Basically, if you aren't a corporate user, your new email is pushed to you and if you delete a message on the handheld, that action is pushed back. But that's it. It doesn't synchronize two ways. This may not seem like too big of a deal until you imagine a typical scenario for me (and lots of other people):

I check my email from the blackberry before work. I delete the unimportant messages from the handheld and, when I get to the office and check my email on my computer, those messages are deleted there as well, which is great. Then I start my day. I get a whole bunch of email all day long. I answer them. I delete them. I get new ones. This goes on for 8 (or 10 or 15) hours until I'm ready to go home. I leave the day having saved two of those messages from the day that I need to reference tomorrow. On the way to my car I check my blackberry and what do I see? 532 unread messages. In actuality all of them are read and all but two of them are deleted. I could just delete them all, but then I wouldn't have the two that I saved and the handheld would also delete them out of my actual Inbox as well causing me to not have them at all any more. Or, I can go through them one by one and figure out which ones I need to save. Or, I can just leave them there, therefore, limiting the usefulness of the Blackberry.

What's funny is that it's OBVIOUS that the Blackberry knows how to do this right, because it does so in the corporate world. In fact, if you use a Yahoo! email account, it'll handle all of this just fine too. But with GMail or any other email account, you basically get one way push and the other way delete and that's it. I can understand it being this way with POP3 because of the inherent nature of the protocol. But an IMAP message store could certainly be more well behaved.

Because Yahoo! does work as intended, using some trickery, it is possible to sort of make this work. First, buy a Yahoo! Plus account so that you don't have to deal with ad puke all over the mail pages and ad puke at the bottom of every message you send. Then, set up all your email accounts to forward to your Yahoo! account and add all of your addresses into the Yahoo! interface. Now, when you get new mail it forwards to Yahoo! which in turns pushes immediately to your handheld. When you read or delete messages in either place (handheld or online) every is synchronized in perfect two-way bliss. Except! As desired, if you reply to any of these emails from your Yahoo! account online they appear to be coming from your real email address. However, when you reply from your Yahoo! account on the Blackberry, the message will appear to be from your Yahoo! address and not from your real email address. As best as I can tell there's no way to fix this.

Dear RIM (Research In Motion — creator of the Blackberry)–

This is just plain silly. With all of your programmers and supposed expertise in this field, there has to be a way to offer two-way synchronization with IMAP servers. There are hundreds of examples of software out there that do just this that you can use as inspiration. Your own software is doing it for corporate users already. Yahoo! has it implemented and working perfectly with you. Given all that, why can't you get it working with something like IMAP? What exactly does my $20/mo go toward if not features like this?

Yours,
Jim Reverend