Blackberry Storm tricks & tips: Single mailbox/data stream push integration

Blackberry mailbox integration allows you to combine all of your pushed email, facebook, and chat (AIM, Yahoo conversation initiations), and call logs, etc. into one data stream. The advantage of this is that you don't have to have 12 different email boxes and other push icons cluttering up the home page of your phone randomly alerting you.

One of the ways the Blackberry multitasks is to place the load of checking multiple email accounts on their own servers and interacting with the phone in a native application rather than many different applications taking up space and resources on the phone. Email is pushed to the phone almost instantaneously as it appears in the native account. Deleting, or otherwise changing content in the universal message box will delete it in the individual email streams.

For this reason, I prefer not to use the Gmail App regularly. With the Blackberry integrated system, I can create, read, delete (on phone and/or on the native server), and open most attachments from a jpg, video, to a Word and Powerpoint. HTML emails and attributes appear as they were intended with an option to download embedded images. Integrated email can check mail from any web based, POP or IMAP account.

I keep my Gmail application on hand for the rare searching of old email in my notoriously overstuffed inbox. Email addresses for email accessed via the Blackberry server are sourced from your Blackberry address book so they need to be added to the phone's address book to create email from outside accounts.

There is also a Blackberry email address that comes with the phone.

I prefer to break down my home screen into different email accounts and keep things separate, responding to pushed data by the priority of the moment, but you can really clean up the home page with one button email.

I rarely use the Blackberry website for maintenance or adding, as all email accounts can be added and maintained by the handset. This is convenient, as in the case of my work email account, which goes down weekly and needs to be re-validated. On reliable mail servers there is no maintenance.