Yet Another BlackBerry Outage: Looking for Mobile E-Mail that Works

The latest mysterious BlackBerry service outage has implications well beyond the future of RIM – this is really about building reliable e-mail from the start.

I've written about BlackBerry service outages in the past, but the latest, which seems to be extending its engagement into day four, is by far the largest, affecting, well, the planet. RIM has been, as usual, tight-lipped about the cause, but the specific source of the problem isn't of immediate interest here. Rather, I have been thinking about the reliability of e-mail overall, or, rather, the fundamental lack of reliability in this more-than-mission-critical capability.

It used to be that we could check our e-mail a few times a day, dismiss most of it, answer the two or three most important messages, and call it a day. No more. E-mail is now often the only communications modality employed by many - they send a message and assume you got it - period. They don't follow up with a call or even another e-mail if the recipient doesn't answer; who has time for that? Everyone seems to assume that e-mail is reliable (and secure - don't get me started on that one, but it's not, not even on a BlackBerry), and it's not. Failure of whatever cause in servers, as we are currently seeing at RIM, results in outages. It's a simple as that.

And yet e-mail is now, as I noted above, mission-critical. We live or die by it. I get about 500 e-mails a day, exclusive of spam, and about 20-30 of these demand a response. Even casual users depend on e-mail for that all-important date on Friday night or to learn where everyone is meeting after the game. I propose that e-mail needs to be taken more seriously, with reliability and fault-tolerance the new key selling points for the next generation of winners.

If a mail server - any mail server, BTW, not just RIM's - goes down, how come another mail server can't just take over for it without missing a beat? It's completely unacceptable that an entire service, like BlackBerry, summarily fails to proceeds (as the folks at Rolls-Royce would say), especially with what is becoming a tiresome frequency. The BlackBerry guys really can't afford failure in the cornerstone of their offering disappointing their entire installed base. As I said to a reporter yesterday, this isn't the end for RIM; it's ferociously difficult to unhook a large user base from a service like this, and users have short memories. As their inboxes refill, they'll be consumed with whatever it is they do, and that will be it until the next time, at least for the vast majority of users.

But there's a real opportunity here for all of us in the field to think about how to build truly fault-tolerant mail (and, while we're at it, many other) services. We may need to update a standard or two, but we have the technology (think, for example, Akamai). The question is, do we have the will?

In the meantime, humor has taken an enormous leap forward, as I saw on the Web: What did one BlackBerry user say to another BlackBerry user? Nothing!

• Wireless / Mobile
• E-mail Services
• BlackBerry
• e-mail
• e-mail reliability
• RIM