What Are The Methods of Receiving Email On BlackBerry?

I noticed on several forums that this is a commonly asked question. So I am posting. There are several ways to get emails into a BlackBerry. BlacKBerry does not use a conventional email client, using a push technology. However, you can integrate nearly any email account including POP and IMAP and Exchange and even add support for Hotmail/GMail/etc email accounts.

1. BIS / BWC email address. (See Glossary) This is the free push email address included with all BlackBerry plans. Most common method for consumers/prosumers. Send the email to the free YOURNAME@carrier.blackberry.net email address. This is true push email, as email will show up instantly on the BlackBerry (in just 5 seconds in many cases) the moment someone sends it from a desktop computer. No need to check email, it shows up immediately on your BlackBerry screen, SMS-style or pager-style! To access to your @blackberry.net email account, See BWC/BIS Login Instructions.
   Tip For Advanced Users: When adding new POP/IMAP accounts to your BWC/BIS account, try entering dummy information for username/password. This will get you straight to the Advanced Server Page, which allows more configuration such as for Secure Password Authentication, etc.
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2. POP and IMAP email. This is available with all BWC accounts above. The BWC webmail site has a configuration that allows you to enter POP hostnames, usernames and passwords for a certain number of POP accounts. Your BWC will automatically check email every 15 minutes and forward a copy of messages to your BlackBerry. This is not true push email; you must send email directly to the @blackberry.net address (or use BES). Information from BlackBerry website
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3. Email forwarding. Configure your existing email addresses to automatically forward a copy to your BWC email address (the one ending in blackberry.net). This will allow you to have a different email address while retaining push email capability, for those cases you do not need a BES. For example, GMAIL supports forwarding.
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4. Third party email software such as GMAIL Mobile (Gmail via BlackBerry Browser). These software behaves as separate clients separate from the BlackBerry Messages Inbox and have tradeoffs, such as not having vibrate alerts, and/or slower synchronization, and/or user interface issues. However, these clients can be very useful for separating your personal email away from your business email, by providing your BlackBerry with a separate, independent Inbox.
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5. BlackBerry Redirector. This is a special software program included on a CD included with BlackBerries, that you can install on your computer. You can run it on a home computer or office computer -- just leave the computer on 24 hours a day. The software will watch for new emails arriving in Microsoft Outlook and then automatically forward a copy of these emails to your BlackBerry. (No BES needed). But you must keep your computer running 24 hours a day to get copies of your email. As a result, not many people like using this method.
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6. Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). If your company gave you your BlackBerry, you are probably running on this too as well. This can be purchased as a server for full internal integration with corporate email, (expensive) or as a BES (MDS) Hosting service for more individual integration (cheaper). Mainly used by corporations, although some prosumers have purchased BES/MDS Hosting services. This is the preferred corporate method of push email, fastest and most secure, and allows you to have your own custom domain names. It interfaces with Exchange Server (or Lotus Domino, or soon Groupwise) and allows your BlackBerry to automatically mirror your Exchange Inbox. Wireless email sync capabilities means that if you delete email on your BlackBerry, it also gets deleted from the desktop. There are other benefits to BES. For example, Version 4.0 of BES also adds wireless over-the--air Addressbook/Calendar/Notes/Tasks synchronization. More information for the full corporate version is found here. Alternatively, you can get BES Hosting Service if you don't want to purchase the full server. The full server itself can cost over a thousand dollars, while getting hosting service for one BlackBerry typically costs less than $25 per month.

All six of the above can be used simultaneously on different email addresses, into the same BlackBerry "Inbox" (Messages screen).


_________________
Thanks,
Mark Rejhon
Mark Rejhon - aka Marky - Home Page of Mark D. Rejhon

Great post Mark!

These are exactly the scenarios I have been investigating.

If anybody else can let me know of additional methods of receiving email on a BlackBerry, please post in here.

Pardon what is probably a dumb question.

I'm considering getting a blackberry (and don't have access to BES service)

If I configure my POP email to forward to my blackberry email -- and I reply to that email from my blackberry -- will the recipient see my blackberry email address or my POP email address in the "from" field.

Hope that question makes sense. Thanks, in advance, for your help with this. I'm just beginning to learn about the world of blackberries!!

If you configure the BWC "From", yes you can have your original POP email address.

Log into your network's BWC to configure this:
http://www.blackberryforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=770

COMCAST and GMAIL users,
follow these instructions:

IMPORTANT:
Don't forget to remove that particular email account from BWC, before you follow the above instructions for forwarding a particular email account. Since forwarding is quicker than the BWC "pull" feature.

Mark;
You seem very knowledgable about blackberrys, so i thought i would ask you about my problems.
i am purchasing several blackberrys for people in our office including myself and i can't decide if we should all use redirector or webclient.
none of us really travel too much, we spend 75% of our time in the office at our computers.
i find that using web client you get all your messages duplicated to the blackberry so if you've read and/or deleted 100+ e-mails during the day, when you go home that night you will have the same 100+ e-mails in your blackberry as unread that you have to go through and figure out where you left off.
1) am i doing something wrong? or is this how it works?
i like the idea of the redirector that it reconciles your e-mails so if you check it on the computer or on the blackberry they reconcile each other.
but the benefit of the web client is that you can open attachments easily...
2) is there an easy way to open attachments using redirector, without having to forward the message to a third party and having it sent back to you in an e-mail?
i also noticed the web client has a 10mb capacity, i believe this capacity is only on the web client and not on the blackberry so if you set up the web client to automatically delete your messages every 1 day then you shouldn't have a problem,
3) but does this mean you can not receive messages over 10mb to your blackberry? does redirector have a capacity?
my other concern is when i reply to messages or forward messages from my blackberry....
4) will they show up in my SENT box on my computer at work if i use web client? how about redirector?
and also, how do you suggest i handle my yahoo and g-mail accounts that i check less often that my work e-mail.
5) should i forward them to webclient using POP? will they still show up on yahoo and g-mail if i do that?
thank you very much for your time, i appreciate any help you can give me, i hope i didn't overwhelm you.

Mark, thanks for the above information on mail forwarding a comcast account. But if I delete the comcast account from BWC, how do I select it as the sent from addresss?

mevermind I just saw the custom sent from address option

Just a quick warning for those that want to use this method for recieving their email from comcast (mail forwarding). I have noticed a large increase in spam sent to my blackberry since changing to mail forwarding. I am assuming that once mail fowarding is activated, all mail is forwarded before comcast's built in filters check the messages. I have noticed mail that was sent to my blackberry that didn't show up on my comcast account. I have added some filters to my BWC, but there filter system is very basic, so a large amount still gets through.

(1)/(2)/(3)/(4) To solve your problem, I recommend BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). See my Hosted BES FAQ at my http://www.BerryFAQ.com and you will see how to get BES relatively inexpensively at $10 to $25 per month. This gives you wireless synchronization:

- Wireless synchronization of incoming emails
- Wireless synchronization of sent/deleted emails
- Wireless synchronization of unread/read status
- Wireless synchronization of Calendar
- Wireless synchronization of Addressbook (BES4 + OS4)
- Wireless synchronization of Tasks (BES4 + OS4)
- Massive amount of storage for attachments
- True push email, slightly faster than BWC
- More reliable than BWC (less likely to overload itself)
- No need to leave your work computers turned on at all times.
- Ability to kill your BlackBerries remotely if your BlackBerry is stolen, your private info is safe!
- MDS is faster than the BlackBerry TCP/IP stack
- Spam filtering is easier to do

At only $10 to $25 per month for BES Hosting, it's well worth it! If you can afford it, get a Small Business Edition BES; it will pay for itself after about a year. (Mailstreet hosting times 4 employees times a year, can pretty much equal the cost of a Small Business Edition BES) BES is expensive but for your type of business, it sounds like it should be very worthwhile because of your specific needs.


(5) You can use BWC simultaneously with the BES method, so you can use GMAIL/Yahoo POP or forwarding, independently of the BES method for your main work emails. Or you can even forward your GMAIL to your BES email address.

Mark, thanks very much for your suggestions, just a few follow up questions:
1) how much is a a Small Business Edition BES?
2) is mailstreet.com $23 per month for one user or the whole company?
3) does hosted BES (i.e. mailstreet) allow you to view all attachments (i.e. word, excel, pdf, pictures, and videos) instantly like BWC?
4) does hosted BES give you AIM?
5) if i set up my yahoo and gmail to POP to the blackberry, do copies of incoming e-mails show up on those accounts as well or just the blackberry?
thanks again.
Dan

I have a quick ? on #5. So the BlackBerry Redirector ONLY works with Exchange? Groupwise & Notes users are forced to use BWC or poney up the fat cash for BES?

a warning about this. AFAIK, the Redirector does NOT work with Lotus Notes. I've tried to install it, no go. However, there is a "replacement" for the Redirector available (see #3 below)

There are alternatives if you are a Notes user:

1. You can try creating an Agent or Rule to forward your Notes e-mail. With Version 5 this doesn't seem to work so well as the form in which Notes forwards the e-mails is really not suited to replying (at least in my case it wasn't); with Notes 6 I can't seem to get the forwarding to work. But if you CAN do this it results in essentially true push e-mail (your PC has to be on all the time, of course);

2. If your organization uses iNotes then BWC can pull your messages from the web and you don't need to run a computer 24/7. This is how I do it and while it's not true push it functions well enough. You get this option by setting up your e-mail from the BWC;

3. If you set up your e-mail from the BWC and choose the option OTHER than iNotes then BWC will download a small app to a PC you keep on 24/7 which will act as a redirector, essentially. If you need true PUSH but can't get Notes forwarding to work this is the best option.

Hope the above helps a bit.

=NLK=

Just a short note about "pushing emails" from Gmail account by forwarding. I don't know if this is temporary thing but both sent and forwarded type emails from Gmail need more than few minutes to leave the gmail server as I think. When I was checking the delivery speed from gmail, it took almost an hour to receive email on my BB which I sent from gmail account. Same thing when I sent email to Gmail account which was set up for forwarding emaul to my BB. I don't know but I hope this is something temporary, b'se I really like to use gmail as a "archive" to everything I sent or receive.

1) Approximately $1500 -- Please ask your BES questions in the BES Admin corner.
2) $23 per month per employee.
3) Yes. Attachments supported.
4) No, but it "enables" access to third party AIM services using the MDS feature.
5) That's a BWC question, not a BES question. BES doesn't do POP, but you can run BWC and BES simultaneously. For BWC, copies show up at Yahoo/Gmail and on the BlackBerry. For BES, copies show up at your Outlook/Exchange email box and on the BlackBerry.

Sorry for the complete newb question, but...

I just received a 7100g from Cingular, and have it configured for my company's BES server. That works fine. I am now trying to configure it to receive my POP email account, but can't seem to find any blackberry info for Cingular. Am I just missing something something that's in front of my face someplace?

Thanks in advance,
Scott

You need to set up a "BWC" account. Go to http://www.cingular.com/blackberry - can't be much easier than that!

Enjoy!

Anyone know of a way to be able to select from multiple "From" (i.e. Reply-to) addresses when replying to a message on my Blackberry? I am familiar with customizing the Return email address so that a personal email address, rather than the carrier.blackberry.net address is used, but any way to have multiple personal email addresses for the From field, from which I can select on a per-message basis?

In MS Outlook, when I compose a new message, I can drop down the "Accounts" list to select an account (and corresponding email address) to reply from. Any way to do something similar on my Blackberry so that one message I send can appear to be from one email address and the next message I send can appear to be from a different email address?

Thanks,
Dan

What's up y'all?

So I just got my BB 7290 today and we are debating on the best way to connect to email. We're a small business - 2 BB users (Can't afford $1,500 for BES).

1. The BB manual made it seem like you can use the Redirector software even if you don't have an inhouse email server. We've been trying to get it to work, but it keeps giving us Memory errors when it tries to initialize. Can we actually use Redirector if we don't have Microsoft Exchange?

2. Also, is there no hope for the poor BB users who don't want to have to constantly delete emails from the BB and desktop. Is any other way to sync emails? Does redirector do that?

3. Regarding file sizes. The T-Mobile rep mentioned that the BB doesn't download all emails but that it just shows the subject title and you can open/ download only those emails that you really want to see. Is this true, or does it download ALL email. It's seems like a junk mail is a part of everyone's life these days. What's the best way to combat this? Currently, I use filters within Microsoft Outlook 2003 to move most of my junk email to either the "trash" or "junk" folders. If forward all emails to my BB, then I'll have to sift through all that junk on the road. This is especially important for me as I do a lot of international travel. When roaming, every MB downloaded is money.

Thanks so much for the info. This forum is great!

Can anyone help me with my two issues:

1. Mail sent to my gmail account are not automatically sent to blackberry, they are however in the BWC (in the Inbox). I set up the account on BWC sucessfully using gmail set up.
2. Using the Mail Connector, it seems that it is running but sometimes I see a red X pop up. I am guessing something is wrong but do not know what. I set up an email account on BWC (for my Lotus Notes at work) and that worked ok (green check)

I reinstalled desktop manager and set it to blackberry internet mail, it installed fine.

Has anyone gotten both Lotus Notes mail connector and gmail working?

Any help would be appreciated.

1. Yes, to my knowledge, unfortunately, you can't us the redirector w/o having Microsoft Outlook. However, you can just set up your e-mail account via webclient. Once you set the account up all you have to do is to input the e-mail address that you wish to be delivered to your device. Your E-mail provider must have the feature of pop-forwarding ie., comcast, yahoo etc. If you're not sure please contact your ESP and ask them if have the ability to do that or not. Most MAIN e-mail providers will be able to give you that option with the exception on Hotmail and MSN- however there are 3rd party programs avaiable at Handango.com With that said, it is easiest for you to contact your partner via PIN messages.

2. You can set your device to delete e-mails on your server once you delete from your handheld. I haven't had the need to do that lately since it's already set but I think that you can activate that feature via your BB Webclient. Do you use Cingular or T-mobile? I don't think that T-mobile offers the 7290...but I could be wrong...nevermind just did research on the T-mobile website and they do have that phone.

3. Based on my experience with Cingular Wireless as a sales rep I think that the person you talked to about your BB may not be fully trained on the product. With all due respect and I am not discrediting the rep but that's why GOD or RIM made BB's to begin with. BB are mainly used for sending and receiving e-mails in real time. Not only will you have the full e-mail, you will also have the ability to access any attachments sent to you.

I currently use BES for my corp e-mails and if you don't want to pay for that service because it's expensive and I don't think it is neccessary for you being that you only have two BB users. Please let me know if there is anything else I may be able to help you with. Thanks.

where can i get the redirector software? i've been using BWC since i purchased my 7230 two months ago and i have forwarded mail from outlook to the handheld but i hate the way it comes in as FWD mail. must you have BES to use redirector? if not, where do i find the software?

any help would be appreciated

Per Mark's first post.

According to what Mark said, redirector comes with your Desktop Software. But unfortunately I may have misplaced mine so I have to find out another way to re-install my software.

Please note that the Desktop Redirector requires that you have Exchange as your e-mail server. It does not work with POP3.

If you seriously want the Desktop Redirector, you can just reinstall the Desktop Manager that you download from the RIM web site. When you install DM, one of the options is to use Desktop Redirector. It will then put DR in the startup folder.

With all these ways to get mail to the bb is there a way to decipher what mail account they were sent from?

say I use the web client to push from two accounts (optonline and gmail) they both come in to my messages box and i have a re-director going for my lotus notes that goes in my message box, now i just got 5 emails, how do i quickly know which one is work related and which one is personal? is there a way? or do i read them all?

read them all

i want to connect outlook express mail client to my blackberry so i can get my email how would i do this? Also i have setup the blackberry email account at cingualar.com but when i compose a message on my blackberry and try to send it, it says theres no emial service??? help plz

Of course you can always use a browser based email - I use Yahoo mail on mobile.yahoo.com, because I have Enterprise for my corp email, and I can't seem to find a way to keep the Yahoo in sync and use my personal address to reply to messages. Anyone have a nice solution to managing a personal and a corp email account?

Mark,

I redirect/foreward several email accounts to my 7290. Is there a way to view/sort incomming messages by the associated email account?

Thanks

I have a 7290 and BB 4.0. I have never used the desktop application because my BB was provisioned OTA and works perfectly with my domain and MAILSTREET's BES server and Exchange. (like )

Now, I have a customer who has an email address on their exchange server for me (me@CUSTOMERSdomain.com). I want have that email sent (copied/forwarded) from my customer's email address to my domain's email address. They can't put me on their BES server and their outlook client doesn't permit forwarding rules. Yet,

To do this, I thought redirector would odo the trick. I installed BB 4.0 desktop and redirector on the customer's computer only. I don't want to use IntelliSync and sync my BB with their Outlook/Exchange -- I just want to have the email redirected. But when I connect my Blackberry 7290 to the customer's computer so I can set the options in Redirector, Redirector pops up a dialog requesting to "generate a new key". I am afraid this will screw up my Blackberry's current communication with my BES server. Will this cause a problem with my current BES communication if I let it generate a key?

Is there a way to successfully setup redirector on customer's machines without adversely affecting the communication from Mailstreet's BES setup?

Thanks in advance,

Just real quickly wanted to say Mark gives us all GREAT INFO! Thanks Mark!!

I have one more question for the all-knowing Mark (Or whoever else can answer it...)

I have a Blackberry that's on an enterprise account, so my work e-mail automatically gets synced all up, and it's great.

I also have a gmail account that I'd love to be able to access on my Blackberry in addition to my work e-mail. But I'd like to be able to keep them seperated to some extent....

I've managed to get gmail set up on the blackberry along side my work e-mail. And when I'm replying to messages, it seems to pick up on whether or not I'm replying to a work message or a gmail (personal) message and insert the appropriate address in the "from" field...

But....

When I'm just outright composing a new message, how do I determine whether or not it'll look like it's coming from my work address or my gmail address? Is there even a way to do this?

I read a lot of posting as well as the official RIM documentation saying that desktop redirector REQUIRES an exchange server. But I also saw posting on the RIM newsgroup for developpers where people managed to get redirector work with POP3 fetched email by outlook clients only with using an exchange server.
I tried to do it but without success.
I was wondering what is the solution to get secure email on the RIM without a BES or hosted BES.
Is a new desktop redirector compatible with POP3 realistic?
I noticed that the redirector takes the email from the Inbox, compress it then encrypt then sends it back to a RIM SMTP server. So taking an email from a POP3 server should in theory be possible.
Has anybody explored this path?

Thanks.

sato

I too am in a small company w/o exchange server. I have a few pop accounts that I pull into Outlook and run through my own rules to screen out spam (~95% of my mail). Right now I've just added a rule to forward any mail that gets through my filters to forward to BWC. So on my BB I get all my mail but it's "from" me. Any way to get BB Redirector to work in my scenario (or some other solution) without getting exchange server?

Thanks very much for your help!

I have a 7230 with TMobile. I am very technical...and I have tried to get the Redirector software up and running and it constantly crashed. I downloaded a mail connector program that worked great and my laptop, but I have lost the link. The program name was Mail Connector (it was a free download) and It was a RIM software product (Teamon Systems Division).

Does any know where I can find this? Tmobile does it support it so they have been no help.

Thank you.

-C

Hi,

My company has just started using Mailstreet's Exchange service, and I am in the process of setting up the BES and my personal email account. Seems like all the Exchange stuff is working (which is my work email address). I can see everything on the BB and things seem to sync wirelessly. I now have a gmail account for my personal email. I would like to set this up to pop using the BWC. This is how I received email on the BB before we went to BES. The problem is that I cannot respond to any email that gets sent to my gmail account. I thought I could have multiple pop emails along-side the BES email account, and everything should work?

Must be doing something wrong.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I live for Australia on Monday and will be in big trouble if I can't get this stuff working.

Thanks in advance, Jim

I've seen this question asked a few times in different forms, but I don't think I've seen an answer, which leads me to suspect that the answer is "No". Sorry if there was an answer elsewhere and I missed it.

We are running BES (works great, I just wish moving a message from the inbox to local Outlook storage on the desktop was seen as a delete by the BB) and many of us set up BIS. Incoming BIS email appears in the BB inbox which is great. However, all outgoing email seems to go through the BES server. Is there any way to tell a BB (mostly 7100t's) to send BES email through the BES email server and to send non-BES (BIS) email through a different relay (BIS server)?

If it makes a diff, all the 7100t's are running 4.00 software, although some have slightly newer revs of that software even though they were all ordered within a few weeks of each other.

Thanks!

Oops, correction. Not 4.00, 4.0. Some 7100t's mainly have modules with version numbers starting with 4.0.0... and others with 4.0.2... but all have IM version 3.80.23. Sorry.

Hope someone on this thread can help!! I have a BB7100v and was initially using the desktop redirector. This was working fine and I loved the fact that I could reply to the email. Unfortunately, during a vacation (the computer was switch off) I decided to use the mobile email service. This also worked fine and I was then able to open the attachments also. The only problem was when I got back to work as my emails came in they appeared open attomatically. This became confusing as I didn't know what I had read without looking at my BB. I decided to go back to my desktop redirector to avoid the confusion while at work and then found I was unable to repond to emails from my BB that came in via the desktop director. Therefore I would like to know

1 Does anyone know why I can't reply to the emails now when I could do so before.

or

2. Is there a way of leaving the messages appear unread on my desktop when using the mobile web based version.