I have the 8703e with Verizon. There are times when I get me email in seconds and then there are other times when it takes 2 to 3 hours for me to get my email.

Yesterday, I did a test by sending a test message to myself. Note: I addition to my Blackberry, I have Outlook opened all the time on my desktop. Anyway, I sent two test messages, one from my personal email and one from my business (POP3) account. Both emails were received in a matter of seconds on my desktop with Outlook but it took 54 minutes for one of the emails to make it to my Blackberry and and additional hour for the second email to get to my Blackberry. Note: Both emails were sent at exactly the same time.

This delay is totally unacptable. I know that when I had a Trio using IMAP the messages never took more than a couple of seconds.

Surely this must be a fixable problem. I called Verizon and was told that this is a very frequent complaint and that the handbook says a message will be delivered within 8 hours. I really like the Blackberry but I am wondering if it is really the answer.

Any thoughts

Yep, "trios" never have problems.

Since you don't say, assuming you are on BIS (not BES), your emails don't sync. They are "pushed" to your BB. Sometime server overloads and the such slow down the carrier portion of the push deliver--earlier this week was a perfect example with Tmobile on the west coast. TMo in that area was down for a few hours. But one couldn't blame RIM or the BlackBerry, because that outage encumbered any data services of TMo at the time, whether BlackBerry or a "trio" or whattheheck.

Maybe Verizon should listen to you, if it is that a frequent complaint.