Blackberry email is “pushed” to Blackberry phones (BB) using two different RIM products. The email account assigned by your cell carrier resides on a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) and every other account you set up uses the Blackberry Internet Service (BIS).
The accounts on a BES push mail to BB users instantaneously, whereas BIS has a polling frequency (the time between checking the server for new mail) of 12-15 min. It’s actually more complex than that, here’s an excerpt from a Blackberry forum post on the subject:
“Rim polls your email accounts every 15 minutes. If it finds mail, it is pushed to your device and Rim will re poll in about 2 minutes. If mail is found, that is also directly pushed and re polls again in 2 minutes. If nothing is found, RIM’s servers revert to the 15 minute re poll cycle.”
There are good reasons for the polling methodology used by BIS. Since RIM doesn’t own or operate the servers it polls using BIS polling too frequently could cause the server to block or delay the requests.
If you find the delay too long you can try a popular trick that we often use on our own BlackBerrys. This will allow you to take advantage of your carrier’s BES server.
Log on to your carriers Blackberry Internet Service portal and change the following (if you don’t have that information you will need to contact your cell carrier):
- Forward your email to your carrier Blackberry account. Your carrier account is the email address that was assigned to your phone i.e. {emailcloak=off}email hidden; JavaScript is required
- change the “reply to” address for your carrier account to your email address. This will ensure recipients send to your real address when they hit reply. See the screen shot included below: