Maybe In Awhile
So I’ve been using a demonstration Blackberry while I’m in London this week. I have mixed feelings on it so far. It’s a handy way to get email in the evening and when I’m at dinner (particularly while the office in Vancouver is ‘awake’). There are a few issues with it though that I think may stop my permanent adoption of it…for now.
I’m worried generally about falling into the ‘crackberry’ habit. One of the nice changes from my ‘on-call’ shipping career to Navarik has meant that I don’t have to answer the phone… all the time. Of course it would be helpful to those trying to reach me but it’s not always necessary to be available instantaneously. There’s a definite risk the Blackberry would lead me to constantly tweaking/checking my email. That may change of course.
Spam’s a big problem on my company email address. Right now because we use an unsophisticated email system at work I sort for spam on my local machine (my powerbook). I use SpamSieve and it works great. The problem is that if my laptop is off it’s not sorting the spam out and the Blackberry is getting pelted with all my spam. I actually think if I could fix this problem I would use it permanently just as a way to keep on top of emails (if I wanted to) while I’m out of the office. We should be switching to a more sophisticated IMAP server in the new year, and some server based spam filtering. That will hopefully also help alleviate this problem.
Another problem is that the POP account I have as my main work account is too limited to make it easy for me to keep one set of email to deal with. If I had the Blackberry client checking my mail as an IMAP account I could keep the mail versions in synch, but what’s happening now is that I now have three versions of my email floating around out there, one in the Blackberry itself, one in the Blackberry webclient and one on my own laptop based email client. I think IMAP would fix all this eventually but I don’t think I want the hassle of manually synchronizing them right now.
The last reason I’m thinking of holding off is that the webclient Rogers offers to customers is terrible for webmail. It doesn’t run in the most popular Mac browsers, it’s slow, uses frames and is just plain crappy. I’m kind of stunned actually that the UI for the Blackberry itself is so good and the webmail front end is so bad. I’ve surfed on this a bit and the current webmail client that I’m supposed to use is different than the one linked to on the Rogers website. It looks like the main Rogers one is run by Electric Mail. Those guys have great spam filtering and a much nicer UI… so if I can somehow switch to that interface I may alleviate problem two and three.
Will post more later as the trial continues this week.
P.S. MarsEdit is working very well.