I can’t count the number of times recently that people have told me that they are about to or just have purchased a Blackberry just so that they could have the all important, critical to business, world goes dark without, feature of “push email“. As a Nokia E61i smartphone user, I have the ability to install “Blackberry” support, as well as MS Exchange “Direct Push” support (Available in Exchange Server 2003 and later) but the feature that I actually use is trusty old IMAP! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Internet Message Access Protocol (known as IMAP to most of us) has had “push email” ever since the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center published RFC2177 in June 1997. I guarantee that this is WAAAAAY before anyone reading this had either a “smart phone” or had heard of “push email”.

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