Setting up your mail using BIS (Blackberry Internet Service)

Once you've opted for blackberry services, the provider will setup an account on blackberry.com for you. For example, I'm using an Airtel connection and I access my account on http://www.airtel.blackberry.com/.

Once you log in, you'd probably want to add your official and personal e-mail. Setting up the email account is simple if you have a gmail account. Just enter your email address and password, it'll start delivering mails in minutes.

For your official id (for non Blackberry Enterprise Server users), blackberry will first try to automatically get the settings after you enter the e-mail/password and if it succeeds, you won't have to enter any more detail. But this could be troublesome for some, as in my case I wanted to setup using OWA (Outlook Web Access) and it picked the POP settings. A workaround is to enter the right e-mail id and a wrong password, this will throw up the settings page where you can manually select which protocol you want to use.

Lastly, I've noticed that mails sent to my gmail address are delivered instantly (using Push I guess) but mails sent to a POP or OWA account takes a few minutes to reach my phone. I guess if you are using Google for your official mails (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html) then the delivery would be instant.