I got this text in from Dan Field just now. Dan is one of the founders at Mailsuite. He sent me a tweet-reply this afternoon pointing out that Mailsuite’s services can really help with the issue I wrote about this morning.
I challenged him to write a quick reply. Here we go:
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Very interesting piece, Ewan… we ran our own research and found the same thing – it’s far too easy to run up big data bills and also kill your battery just by using a basic a feature such as automatic email updates – see the recent Sunday Times article “Hello, caller, checking your email has cost £5,000”!
People like to have multiple messaging accounts set up (Email, Exchange, Twitter, Yammer, etc) and want instant access to these messages. A standard smartphone polls/checks all messages for each account, and downloading every new message including spam, images and in many cases all attachments too.
MailSuite effectively turns any standard smartphone into a Blackberry. We unify all of your messaging accounts (including Twitter, Yammer, etc) saving the individual polling for new messages, compress the data by up 98% (average 96%) and give full push email so there isn’t so much of the constant polling (all with no software to install).
A big issue with today’s smartphones it’s all too easy to set up all of your messaging accounts and hit the road… at least until about midday when your battery dries out! Both the end user and the MNO need the tools to manage this data, that’s Mailsuite!
Highly interesting. 96% average compression? That is absolutely phenomenal!
If you’d like to test out Dan’s claims, get yourself an account at www.mailsuite.com. I’m going to do that now.
Woah there – having read through their website (the speling mistrakes and poor layout/formatting not withstanding) I see no evidence of security/worthiness beyond ‘trust us, we’ve been around 4 years’.
So they want ALL my email login details – including (if they were to be truly useful in saving bty use/data) my corporate login info. Which (because I’m a Google Apps user) means all the private and shared Google documents, my calendar, etc.
And there’s no price up there. Or explanation of exactly HOW the service works (no software to install? “Works on any network, any country and all modern phones”? *REALLY*?).
For all I know the ‘secure server’ could be in Dan’s bedroom.
My former Corporate IT manager’s BS radar is screaming about this.
I’ll ask Dan to respond!
+1
Hi Mike,
Thanks for your comment… all feedback is welcome and I can understand your concerns. It’s something we recently had to cover for a large multinational who are about to start with Mailsuite… their European CIO is now happy with our security systems.
The website is old, and is currently being redeveloped with a lot more information to help cover these types of questions.
As you have noted our service does require some access to your emails, but almost all email service providers will only have username/password access for this. Messaging servers are still fairly old tech – if they could give more granular access we would use it. So we have put in place several layers of security to make sure your details are safe and have been handling email in this way for about 5 years for customers in over 30 countries.
Google have recently started to open up more granular access through oAuth and we are implementing this very soon too… we already use oAuth for Twitter & Yammer and Facebook Connect for FB so we are doing as much as the industry allows at the moment.
All of our servers are cloud based (Amazon AWS) and along with the strong security Amazon offer we add additional layers of safety at each server.
Happy to talk more, email dan.field@mailsuite.com or @dan_jf on Twitter
Dan
Must admit it sounds tempting. I have similar fears to Mike42 though. I also don’t like the idea of not knowing how much this would cost after the first 30 days. I hate getting used to a product that is free only to find out that I need to start paying later on.
If they get the site updated and include some costs and more information about security beyond “Trust Us” I will revisit.
Let’s get Dan — the founder — to sort us all out a trial?
Will admit – knowing how mental you are about security and simplicity, I
would be calmer about it if you trust it 🙂 Ah I remember the heady days of
VoxSpin (@daverage on twitter – we spoke a lot about it lol)
Will admit – knowing how mental you are about security and simplicity, I
would be calmer about it if you trust it 🙂 Ah I remember the heady days of
VoxSpin (@daverage on twitter – we spoke a lot about it lol)
I’m not that mental 😉
Right let me see if Dan can sort us out with some trials.
I still think it was your fault they went under 😀
Dan, d’ya reckon a few MIR readers could get a trial account to test out the
service?
I’m sure we can sort something out for you…
Will be in touch.