Who's Afraid of Wireless E-Mail?

Wireless e-mail will be more important in next-generation networks, but watch out for bugs, viruses and other challenges.

Today, according to Messaging Online, there are more than 300 million e-mail boxes in the United States alone that receive nearly three quarters of a billion Internet messages each day. Although currently only 2% of wireless users receive data via their wireless devices, 65% want some type of e-mail messaging on their existing wireless devices, according to a CTIA study.

"Every user statistic you look at shows that e-mail is the No. 1 application," said Scott Petry, Postini founder & vice president of products. "It's the first thing people do, it's the thing people spend the most time doing, and e-mail is a much tighter protocol and passes data in a much more efficient manner. So there's high bang for the buck there."

Next-generation digital, packetized networks will provide higher speeds and "always-on" e-mail functionality.

"What the future wireless networks are going to be able to do is to give you a different experience than what you have today for e-mail, more like a virtual desktop," said Janet Boudris, BellSouth Wireless Data senior vice president. "What's missing today is if you wanted to boot up your laptop and treat it like a virtual office. That's very difficult to do in a wireless environment."

Boudris said that in the future, microbrowsers will allow people in a business environment to send and receive messages, and they're also going to be able to check a price via the Internet. Today, businesses send e-mail messages if they have price changes.

"As you move forward, you're going to see a combination of accessing more business applications when you're in a mobile environment," she said. "The requirement for communicating with people - messaging, which was the original form of e-mail - is not going to go away. A lot of the attachments and what people send across e-mail may be actually complemented as you access more Web-based applications."

And it's the same thing for consumers: Instant messaging is really important, but when you want specific information, you'll use a microbrowser. The combination of a microbrowser and e-mail, Boudris said, will give you more power in a wireless environment to get what you want when you want it.

As providers plan next-generation networks, it's important to pay close attention to wireless e-mail services, how they affect your 2.5G and 3G networks and the challenges that may affect you in the not-too-distant future.

Mobile-Mail Challenges Ahead? One challenge for consumers, Petry said, is being overwhelmed with multiple e-mail addresses. According to Jupiter Communications, every e-mail user today has 2.4 e-mail addresses, typically a work address and a Yahoo or Hotmail address.

"As we see more devices, you're going to see an explosion of e-mail addresses or the integration of these devices behind a single e-mail address," he said. "That's interesting from a carrier-opportunity perspective."

Providers have an opportunity to increase the equity of their service addresses by moving more into the e-mail space and even becoming e-mail-service providers (ESPs), Petry said. Solutions such as AirPostini enable ESPs to integrate subscribers' e-mail services with their existing wireless devices.

"What we think carriers will want to do over time is build equity in a longer-standing address than just the phone number," he said. "Today, users churn off a cellular phone plan after 1 to 1.5 years, but users hold on to e-mail addresses three years or more."

But if you are going to build out e-mail services, you will face the same challenges that the ISPs and portals have, including the cost of building a large-scale, robust, highly available, reliable mail system.

Providers "are going to have to build competencies where they may not necessarily have them," Petry explained. "The other challenges are that when they deploy, they're going to be faced with the same vulnerabilities that large-scale mail installations face: denial of service attacks, virus outbreaks, spamming attacks."

According to anti-virus experts, there is little risk for viruses infecting wireless-phone protocols today. The consensus is that WAP and wireless devices are too simple to be used for viruses today, but that may soon change.

"Cellular phones are single-function devices," Petry said. "As phones get smarter, they're going to look more like computers, and there's going to be more vulnerability to virus attacks."

There already have been cases of virus-type problems attacking Asian and European providers' networks. For example, NTT DoCoMo's i-mode service, which features peer-to-peer networking from handset to handset, experienced a virus that caused users to dial the Japanese equivalent of 911 simultaneously. Someone embedded a script in a message sent to someone else that forced that cellular phone to dial 911 on the next outgoing call. If you received a message from a user who had the virus on his phone, then the next time you dialed, your phone would call 911 automatically. The infected messages spread like wildfire.

Even today, with the least-sophisticated phones, providers and subscribers still are exposed to virus attacks. Even if the devices aren't sophisticated enough today to risk a virus, wireless networks still are vulnerable. Last summer, a PC worm called Timofonica targeted the wireless network of Telefonica in Spain by directing mail from infected PCs to a special e-mail gateway designed to forward messages to cellular phones as text. Timofonica sent embedded e-mail attachments similar to the "I love you" virus and also brought the mail servers down by generating false messages to random phone numbers sent through the SMS gateway. The result: It flooded the Spanish provider's data channel.

"Timofonica is less a virus that attacks the cellular phone than a denial-of-service attack on the SMS channels of the cellular network," Petry said.

"Eventually, (viruses) will be a problem as everybody gets good at hacking," Boudris said. "Today, in our system, we don't open up attachments, so you have less of an opportunity for that to occur. We believe, however, that people should be prepared as we move into the future for those things to occur."

Boudris said she feels safe, for now.

"Most networks are software-defined," she said. "I'm confident that most companies who operate software-defined are very aware of what they need to do to protect themselves and how people can access the system. Most of the time when you're accessing our network, you're not getting into our software, you're writing the facility, but I'm sure people are attentive to that."

Providers must be attentive to the threat, however, and protect their networks against viruses and bugs that may be started and spread through wireless e-mail.

"You can't force your users to upgrade their software all the time," Petry said. "You have to make sure you have rigorous controls for these kinds of things in real time at your mail server. In other words, the server needs to be smart enough when it sees these messages to say that's a virus and throw it out."