That all depends on how much you value the time between someone sending you an e-mail and you actually receiving and reading it. If near instantaneous alerts are what you're after, go for push mail.

This is how it works: The BlackBerry server constantly monitors your mailbox for any new mail and when something does arrive, it immediately 'pushes' it over to your cellphone.

If time is not of the essence and you are willing to go about your business and check on your inbox once in a while, configure your mobile phone to send and receive e-mail via the GPRS connection. Better still, if you have a 3G or a 3.5G cellphone, the data transfers are faster and cheaper.

Even without a plan, the pay-per-use charge for GPRS is only 0.54 cents per kB measured in blocks of 2kB.

In most phones, the e-mail reader is configured to just send over the message headers. If you want to read further, you need to select that message. Only then will the entire body of the text be sent over. Many mobile phones today come with the ability to use your Yahoo and Gmail accounts in this way.

The disadvantage is that you need to physically 'pull' the mail from your server on to your mobile phone every now and then. If you do it once too often, or if you have loads of e-mail to read, then you might find yourself having to pay more data charges than the BlackBerry plan.

Here's a rough guide on how to calculate GPRS data access charges:

Downloading of 100 message headers is about 10kB

One message containing 100 characters (including spaces) is about 1kB. For example, if I:

• Receive 500 messages a day, (and download only the headers), that is about 50kB and
• Read entire body of 50 e-mail messages, each containing 100 characters, that is about 50kB
  Then, in a month I will be incurring about 30 x 100kB x 0.54 cents = $16.20
• If I multiply that by four times, that is, more than 2,000 message headers and 200 e-mail messages a day, then it is cheaper to go the BlackBerry route.