BIS customers now getting instant IMAP e-mail

BIS cus­tomers now get­ting instant IMAP e-mail | Black­Berry Cool

It’s great to see the upgrade, espe­cially for BIS users who have had less-than-stellar deliv­ery times, but you have to won­der why it took so long for IMAP IDLE to be supported.

Absolutely. This is the kind of fine print that they don’t warn you about when you get a Black­Berry device. “We sup­port your IMAP and POP email, but only by rout­ing all traf­fic through our servers and delay­ing email. Oh, and you can’t just authen­ti­cate; you need, um, ser­vice books.”

That last detail was par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing to explain to my mom today, who was about to ask for a refund on her data plan from AT&T because she hadn’t been get­ting email for two weeks.

Actu­ally Mom, even though your user­name and pass­word are set up to check and to syn­chro­nize your email, there’s this extra layer of authen­ti­ca­tion called ser­vice books. They basi­cally man­age the syn­chro­niza­tion between your device and the Black­Berry servers, so your mail has prob­a­bly been “sit­ting on their server” ready to deliver, but your device hasn’t been able to get into it.

Oh, yeah, and the ser­vice books? They will stop work­ing. Yes, even when your pass­word is correct.

I sup­pose this whole instant IMAP server upgrade is to make them more com­pet­i­tive in the ever-lucrative con­sumer mar­ket, but this is the kind of zero-day fea­ture that any real PDA should support.

Count­ing down the days until I can switch to some­thing else… some­thing that sup­ports real inter­net would be good too. Maybe by the time I’m ready ($$) to switch devices, there will even be a device (Android?) that will give me pause before imme­di­ately jump­ing for an iPhone. But I’m not count­ing on it.