Unless you have a BlackBerry or are using an Exchange email, you probably don't have true "push" email. A lot of devices offer scheduled mail requests, especially for personal email like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo. The problem with that is to simulate push email, your device would need to be set to check for messages every 5 minutes. That can be a big drain on your battery. As most of us already know, battery life is precious on these multi-tasking mobile devices of ours.

For my person email, I use Yahoo. It is a pretty old account, long before the days of the now popular Gmail. Yahoo has a nice (free) service called Yahoo Alerts. You can choose from a wide variety of topics like News, Stocks, Sports, Weather and more. The alert will be sent to your email or mobile device (via SMS text message) or both.

One of the Yahoo Alerts that can be set up is called Mail. This feature will send you a SMS text message to your mobile phone every time you receive an email in your Yahoo Mail account. The beautiful thing is that an SMS message is a true push communication so there is no drain on your battery life and you can be "alerted" instantly when you have a new email message. I have been using this service for a while and I love it.

You will also need to set up a filter in your Yahoo Mail settings. To ensure that all new email messages would be sent to me, here is the filter I created.

TEXT ALERT

If...To/CC contains "@" Then...Move message to Inbox folder and forward message to my wireless device

Beware, that if you get a lot of emails and you don't have an unlimited SMS message plan with your carrier, the costs could add up fast.
 

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