[teylini]

My wife and I have ordered, but not yet received, two BlackBerry Curves. I use Gmail and she uses Hotmail as our personal email addresses.

I am assuming that the best way to access our personal accounts will be to use BIS for push access. These are going to be our personal BlackBerrys and are not on a BES.

How seamless is the access to Hotmail and Gmail using BIS? If we send a message from our handheld, will it show up in our Sent Items in our Hotmail/Gmail accounts? If we delete on the handheld/PC will it delete in the other location automatically? Will messages sent from our handheld have the appropriate Gmail/Hotmail email address associated with them?

Also, can you back-up/restore contact information using BIS? Without syncing your handheld to your local PC?

The last time I used a BlackBerry was in 2003/04, it was set-up with my company's BES and Microsoft Exchange, so all of these things worked well. I am hoping that BIS has come a long way in 5 years and can make all of those things happen with our personal email accounts now

[whsbuss]

Push email for gmail/hotmail works very well on the current BIS. Here are some answers to your questions:

1. Sent email from the BB will appear in the gmail/hotmail Sent folders, but not the other way around (only email sent from the BB will appear as Sent email).

2. Messages read/deleted on the BB will be reflected on the gmail/hotmail account. However, email read in the online account will not be reflected on the BB. Deleted email will "eventually" be deleted on the BB - somewhere between 15 minutes to 6 hours.

3. There is currently no app that syncs contacts between the BB and email accounts on BIS.

If you use Yahoo! email you will get instant read/delete actions from the online account to your BB. They are the only BIS email account that provides this.

Good luck with your new Curves!

[teylini]

Thank you whsbuss!

It works exactly like you said it would.

[lemmy]

I have found that with the default email setup, if you read a message on the BB, it does not show up as read in gmail. But if you delete it it does delete in gmail. If you set it up to use IMAP, messages read on the BB are shown and read on gmail, but using IMAP, the messages sent from the BB do not show up as sent mail in gmail. You have to go in and put your own email address in BIS as an auto BCC.