Oct/Nov 2006

Can an acronym like LEMONADE really betoken something dramatic in the world of mobile email? Apparently yes. It's the name of a group of Internet gurus who have come up with new open standard for squeezing emails into the limited bandwidth sometimes available in the mobile world, and it was published this August.

It really does stand for something meaningful - namely License to Enhanced Mobile Oriented and Diverse Endpoints. So now you know. Behind it is the Internet Engineering Task Force, an international community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture.

The object of its LEMONADE programme has been to draw up a set of enhancements and profiles for Internet email submission, transport and retrieval. The objective, as IETF expresses it, is "to facilitate operation on platforms with constrained resources, or communications links with high latency or limited bandwidth."

Translating all that into real-world activities, it should mean you will be able to send and receive larger mobile emails more quickly and reliably than in the past.

 

Key features in the new standard include extensions to the existing IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) email protocols used throughout the world for email receipt and transmission.

Isode, an email service provider specialising in highly secure systems, claims to be the first in the field to have come up with a product that takes advantage of these new standards. It has released a software update to its existing M-Box email server, and claims that this "will challenge the dominance of the mobile email market by RIM's BlackBerry."

Its attraction is that it could bring "push" email (automatic notification of new messages) to a much wider audience than have enjoyed it hitherto - or so Isode says.

Its upgraded M-Box informs mobile email users that new messages have arrived even when there is no other activity taking place between the mobile device and the server. It achieves this by exchanging a tiny data packet every 15 minutes with the mobile device. Isode calls this an electronic "What's new?", "Not much," conversation.

That's not the only trick up its sleeve. Using LEMONADE protocols, Isode says its system avoids the problem afflicting previous mobiles when a connection was broken during mobile IMAP email checking. Formerly this required a bandwidth intensive start-up and re-synchronisation, Isode says. Instead of rechecking the whole mailbox, the new product merely checks for further mailbox changes.