MoMail, Digital Rosetta Stone for Mobile Phones

September 3rd, 2007

Momail is a free mobile application that lets you read and answer your emails from your mobile conveniently and cheaply. The company has so far received an undisclosed convertible loan from private investors. I met up with Momail’s founder & CEO, Roger Grönberg, and Honour Pearson, the company’s business developer, in a cafe in Stockholm’s Östermalmstorg district to learn more about how the product is set up, its main value proposition, and the company’s future direction as a carrier of mobile content.

Adapting Incoming Emails To Your Phone
MoMail’s most interesting feature to me is its ability to optimize emails before delivering them to your phone. The company keeps track of 2300 phones across 450 features including screen resolution, screen size, pixel depth, graphics processing power, and the phone’s ability to open pdf’s and other popular attachments.

Every time you receive an email, MoMail processes it and tailors it to your phone. So let’s say you have an old phone with a small screen resolution and no office (word, pdf, excel) software installed:

If your friend sends you an email with 5 large picture attachments then MoMail will resize those pictures to fit your screen resolution and image formats. This will cost you less when you stream the data and make sure that the images are viewed optimally.
If a coworker sends you a white paper in PDF format, then MoMail will not attempt to send you the attachment because it knows that your phone would not be able to handle it. Instead it can present you with the attachment’s content in text format within the email itself.

Other Features
Any mobile email product would be expected to have reading , sending, forwarding, and deleting email functionality. MoMail also has some other pretty nifty features. Straight from their white paper:

Outstanding Device Support –Unlike other mobile email services in the market today, Momail does not require a special client or software to be downloaded into the mobile device as it leverages the standard email program already in the phone. This simplicity allows Momail to be the market leader in device support, serving approximately 80 percent of all mobiles available today. In addition, all new handsets will be able to Momail support at launch.

Magic Restore – Original pictures and documents are saved in your Momail inbox on the web. Therefore, if/when you forward the picture to another mobile with Momail, the picture will be automatically optimized specifically for the device to which it is sent. If you want to forward the picture in its original size, no editing is required as a copy will be in the receiver’s Momail inbox on the web. This behavior requires a minimum of data when transporting to and from your mobile, thus receiving and sending photos is quick and economical.

Attachment support – Momail supports multiple types of attachments, for example, 40+ different formats of pictures, Word- and PDF-documents. All of these are automatically optimized for each individual device and can be read directly on the mobile device. Attachments can also be forwarded from the mobile and can be read in their original format by the recipient.

AutoConfig – Momail’s simplicity enables it to be automatically configured for both data traffic and email use with a minimum of user input upon registering for the service.

AutoCollect – With Momail, you can use and control all of your email accounts easily, and aggregate all incoming emails into one Momail inbox.

Dynamic Sender – Momail dynamically differentiates between email addresses aggregated into your Momail inbox. Thus, when you reply to emails received in the aggregated Momail inbox, the answer will be from the email account to which the original email was sent. For example, if you answer an email sent to your Gmail account via Momail, your reply will automatically show your Gmail address as sender.

True Momail – As with SMS and MMS Momail permits users to send emails to each other using only the receivers’ mobile phone number.

Border Patrol – Momail automatically converts email from regions with a character set that the receiver’s mobile normally can’t view into clearly legible messages.

Antivirus & Spam control – Momail has integrated IronPort antivirus and spam control into its standard service. This leading email and web security software minimizes the risk of viruses and spam reaching your mobile device.

You can read MoMail’s full two page white paper here.

MoMail Usage patterns
Today most users are using MoMail to aggregate all incoming emails to their phone. Momail users can be segmented into 3 big groups:

Old school mobile users who are usually not that good at writing on their phone: they use their MoMail to get an idea of the subject of the received email then reply when they go back home from their home computer.
The second category of users usually read the email and send a short answer straight from the phone.
The third category of users are the most phone friendly. Those users would do anything from their phone that they can do from their computer like sending full text replies, opening attachments, and forwarding emails right from the mobile.

How MoMail Plans to Be a Digital Rosetta Stone
Roger Grönberg expects users to change behaviour going forward. This is why he is broadening MoMail to be as a carrier of digital material - not just email.

Imagine you want to send a ringtone to a friend of yours. You can use phone’s Bluetooth or infrared. Both of those methods are limited to recipients who happen to be in your vicinity. You can also send that ringtone through MMS. But MMS is expensive and has size limitations.

If you want to send a calendar event or a contact card then the same challenges apply. Different phones store contact and calendar information in different formats.

So the problem of receiving email on your mobile is an instance of a more general problem: receiving digital content on your mobile. And MoMail’s goal is to eventually make sure that any set of bits you receive are structured in a way that is the most suitable to your mobile, no matter which one you own.

MoMail is also interested in giving users the ability to upload content from their phones to their favorite online communities and web applications at the click of a button. Again MoMail would make use of its understanding of phones to deliver the video you just took with your cellphone to your FaceBook, transforming your phone’s propietary format into a format that FaceBook can understand.

Conclusion
Mobiles come in different forms and shapes with various capabilities. Handset vendors, software companies, operators, and other players in the mobile environment are notorious for their lack of common standards. And this problem does not seem to be going away anytime in the near future. MoMail’s ability to understand each phone’s unique individuality and speak its specific language might very well postition it as the answer to that problem.