The organisation I work for has a few BlackBerry mobile email devices. These things are quite cool, in their way. You install a server that polls peoples Exchamge mailboxes, and it then pushes thier mail out through the intermerweb, and over GPRS to the handheld device. Today I had to reconfigure acouple of them.
It did get me thinking though: Isn’t this a broken way of using email? People have them because they must know about that email now. I thought that wasn’t the point of email? To me it’s a nice way to either:

1. Convey something by text rather than speech- for example, send someone a copy of a configuration file, spreadsheet of accounts, or a document.

2. Pass on a message that can wait until that person is ready to read it (this, to me is email’s great strength).

Given that all the people that use them also have VPN and webmail, it just seems strange, but then again, the organisation seems to view email as ‘instant, 100% reliable communication’, (it’s the only place I’ve worked that extensively uses read receipts) which these days, it isn’t, thanks to spambot networks. Am I off the mark here? I’d rather someone phoned me with an urgent message, even if it then involved reading email to get a document.