Research: Key trends in mobile push email

Push or pull?

With an increasing user base of mobile email devices, we next explored the technology in use. In particular, we were interested in investigating the uptake of devices based on push, or "always-on", email technology compared with those that rely on email pull.

With push technology, emails are sent directly to the handset as soon as they are received by the mail delivery server. Immediate access to these emails requires an "always on" connection, with resultant higher connection charges. With the more traditional pull technology, the handset polls the mail delivery server and emails are only accessed at user request (or at designated intervals in time).

Our research indicated that push email is now the most prevalent implementation technology, with 50 percent higher penetration than pull email within our research sample. However, it is worth noting that a number of enterprises are reporting use of both technologies concurrently.

Pull technology has the greatest popularity with the smallest organisations. A little over one-quarter (27 percent) of respondents from the SOHO sector reported use of push email and 55 percent were using pull technology. This is effectively the reverse of the situation in all the other larger sectors. By vertical market, the finance and banking sectors appear to be strong adopters of push technology, with more than 80 percent of all respondents using these solutions.

Figure 5: Push or pull mobile email

Q15: Do you use push and/or pull mobile email technologies in the solutions applied within your organisation? (Multiple responses)
Base: All respondents whose organisations have mobile email. (Total: 311)
Source: Rhetorik 2007