Lemonade is way forward for mobile email

FORGET THE RIM Blackberries and Windows Mobile 6.0 handsets of this world, the way forward towards mass adoption of mobile email is an email profile called Lemonade, says Synchronica.

The fact that the License to Enhanced Mobile Oriented And Diverse Endpoints (lemonade) spec was actually created by the Internet's own body, the IETF is very definitely a good sign.

But the best bit about Lemonade, according to Synchrnonica's CEO, Carsten Brinkschulte, is that it doesn't require any email client software to be downloaded to a mobile handset.

Consequently it won't just operate on the 17 million or so Symbian based handsets sold in a year, it will run on around 1.3 billion feature phones which the general public already possess.

What the Lemonade profile effectively provides is 'mobile push' extensions to the existing IMAP and POP3 standards. So you can easily send a notification of a received email to a mobile phone using Lemonade and a standard email server software. Along with Synchronica's gateway, of course.

The crucial point, however, is that there are two flavours to the accepted method of sending a 'push' email notification to a mobile phone.

One of these is the Electronic Mail Notification (EMN) standard created by the OMA, a mobile industry association. Basically this sets out a method for sending the notifications by SMS (Text messaging).

Sending loads of texts just to inform users that they have received a new email message makes a great deal of sense to the mobile network operators. Because they don't have to pay for the texts.

The alternative method is to employ a technique called 'IMAP idle'. This basically enables mobile phone to constantly poll an email server.

It's a great solution for independent email providers but a nightmare for the mobile network operators because it could potentially saturate their networks with data traffic as hundreds of thousands of users keep polling their email servers to see if anything new has arrived.

Synchronica has taken the easy route out and simply supports both 'IMAP idle' and EMN. Which means it can acquire customers from both sides of the fence - operators and independent email providers.

Brinkschulte revealed that Lemonade works better on some handsets than on others and that Sony Ericsson is way ahead of the pack here.

If he's right the established vendors in the mobile email market are in deep trouble because they all depend on an email client being downloaded to the mobile handset.

Plus it will be the developing markets which immediately embrace Lemonade whole-heatedly. Why? Because they don't have established fixed line networks but they do have cellular networks. So the handset makes the obvious email client device.

Bizarre but true, it will almost certainly be the emerging markets that show the way towards universal acceptance of email on mobile phones. Not the established markets as some might expect. µ

L'INQ
Lemonade