Hi,

I have what I think is a simple use case, but I can't get a straight answer and all my friends who use Blackberry's are on enterprise servers, so they don't know...

My small company has a secure SSL POP3 mail server and I use Outlook on my laptop for emails.

I am looking to get a Curve or a Pearl. What I want to be able to do is download email onto my BB on demand. I don't want email to be "pushed", and I only want email when I ask for it. I also want it to keep copies of the email on the server when I'm doing email from the BB.

So basically I want my laptop to be my "master" for email, and just use the BB to do emails that arrive when I'm not able to get at my laptop. When I do get back to my laptop it should be able to get all the emails I sent/received from my BB while I was away.

This seems like a common usecase to me, but everyone looks at me like I'm weird when I ask, and all the sales guys talk about how wonderful "push" email is but I just don't want every single email going to my BB.

- Don

Unless you choose to use a web-based e-mail and access it through the phone's browser, you have no realistic options. Blackberry products are push devices.

One other option you have is to set up your account through BIS and have it not forward emails to your BB by default using the filters, and then whenever you want it to forward them you can just set the filter(s) to forward and it will do so until you change it back. Won't work for every application and it isn't like the gmail app but some people use it this way.

Speaking of the gmail app, you may be able to create a gmail account and have it access your work POP email and just use the java app to pull up the account. That is an option worth looking at and I know it works for one of my POP accounts.

Why not just get a pull device if that's what you want?

AKG's filter suggestion is about as good as it gets with BIS. I've read that someone was able to use the firewall to temporarily block mail delivery and not have mail queue but I don't have the details on setting that up. The advantage to the latter approach if it works is that you could enable and disable on the Blackberry itself. Editing BIS filters must be done via the carrier's BIS site.

In any case, why not get something designed to work the way you want it to work rather than rig up something on a Blackberry?

Cool, thanks for the information.

I don't mean to be daft, but what would you recommend as a "pull" device? The reason I've been looking at the BB is the curve is small and light and I really want a "pocket" phone. The TREO just doesn't work for that. I would love to hear suggestions.

I do suppose I could live with turning the service off-and-on through the web interface when I am traveling or not.

I have to admit I am surprised the BB isn't more friendly to people who do 90% of the email on a laptop and receive a couple hundred emails per day. I just can't see myself opening up email on the BB after not doing so for a couple weeks and waiting for it to download-then-delete a couple thousand email I've already processed...

- Don

Solution could be to have your laptop download all emails before blackberry can get to them. Here is how:

- Configure Outlook to NOT leave emails on server.
- Configure Outlook to check for emails as often as possible, every minute for example.

That would make your laptop get all emails before blackberry has a chance. One or two might sneak to device, but not hundreds.

When leaving your office, close Outlook or shut down laptop. That's when blackberry will start copying all new messages that arrive when you are away from your laptop.

Turn on laptop- and all these emails will be downloaded by Outlook, because blackberry does not delete emails it downloads.

Yes that's true...I do this too. It works pretty well except for every now and then the BB will happen to poll the server before outlook does as already mentioned. It's not that big of a deal really.

If you use the BES/BB combo you will realize that you will end up doing less e-mail on you laptop and more on your BB because anything you do on your BB is automatically synched to your mail file. You do your work once in either place. I have one user who explained it best when he came from a Treo/Pull environment. With the Treo he would still have 2 hours work on his laptop after travel re-doing everything he had already done. With the BB 2 hours work is eliminated.