As many of you know, I am no longer an academic. I have sold out, as instructed by Reel Big Fish back in the 90s, and I work in a large law firm’s IT department. As such, I have come to rely on Microsoft Exchange for email and calendaring, SharePoint for collaboration, and Windows server environments. While these things have their cons and pros (to be saved for later posts), I have come to accept the world I live in.

One nice thing about using corporate email is corporate email connections to mobile devices. While we are a primarily a BlackBerry shop (and I am the BlackBerry Administrator, among other things), we have a small handful of people who use other mobile devices, syncing their email via an implementation of Microsoft’s ActiveSync. ActiveSync can be one of two things: a desktop program that syncs data to a mobile device, or it can run on a Microsoft Exchange server and sync email, calendar, contacts, and tasks wirelessly with a mobile device. The latter is what I am concerned with here. 

I have had two experiences using ActiveSync. One is with my Palm Treo 650w. The “w” stands for Windows Mobile, and I hate it. Windows Mobile 4 (I haven’t tried 5 yet). It has all the confusion of the Windows OS including impossibly buried settings and ambiguous layouts combined with the convenience of running it in a situation where your possibilities are extremely limited. There’s something about “Configuring network connections” on a cell phone that just doesn’t sit right with me (and I’m not talking about WiFi here). ActiveSync syncs with my Exchange server fine, but it takes an awful long time to update when the device has been off, and does not sync read messages or dismissed appointments very quickly. It also doesn’t pre-download messages, or keep them around for any discernible amount of time, so there appears to be a lot of re-downloading. It sucks.

My other experience with ActiveSync has been on my iPhone. I recently downloaded the beta 2.0 OS for it, and couldn’t wait to get work email on my personal phone. Many of the issues I’ve alluded to above plagued me on the iPhone as well. Also, the iPhone’s slower data connection really hurt. I limited my data sync to only one day’s worth and turned off background email checking just to avoid slowdowns. The syncing does seem a little better on the iPhone in terms of reads and deletes, but, again, if I don’t keep up with it, I will wait minutes to see my email again.

Based on my experience with the Treo, I don’t think this is the iPhone’s fault. It does make me wonder why ActiveSync is so bad. Why can’t these devices actually store the email, and do background updates? Why do I have to wait so damn long just to see if there are new emails? It really seems like the issue is with ActiveSync doing a full mailbox scan every time it reconnects, and that just sucks. If you get a lot of email, forget it, it’s not worthwhile.

In comparison, I have my Gmail synced via IMAP to my iPhone, and it seems to store old messages, and update in a much more reasonable timeframe. While I do get far less personal email in my Gmail than I do work emails, the way it loads is different. With the IMAP account, my entire Inbox doesn’t mysteriously disappear from the screen while I wait for it to update. Instead, I see the new messages pop in just as email has done on a desktop application as far back as I can remember. I’d be interested to hear about other people’s experiences with this who have highly active IMAP accounts, but the IMAP experience on the iPhone just seems more like what I’d expect. I may consider setting up Gmail on my Treo to compare, but I just hate it so much…

BlackBerry does not have these issues. There is a consistent experience regardless of email protocol, and it works well. That, among other things, is what makes BlackBerry the best mobile email platform (though it does obviously suffer in other areas, which is the subject of another post). As always, I’d be excited to hear about other people’s experiences, especially if you know why ActiveSync sucks!