Toronto-based iseemedia is developing a new service that promises to add the ability to send and receive e-mails to ANY cell phone, regardless of whether it was ever designed for it or not. It’s called iseemail and it works by translating e-mails into SMS text messages and vice versa. This means that someone on a laptop can write an e-mail and it will arrive on your phone as a text message. You can then send a text reply and it will arrive on that person’s laptop as an e-mail. The way in which the service translates and optimizes the content between the two is quite clever and, as it turns out, could be very cost-efficient.

As it exists today iseemail faces a number of issues. These begin with the way it tries to take on the more advanced functionality of e-mail where you need to be able to reply to large groups, save draft e-mails, or search through several months of previous messages. That’s only a few examples.

Since the software on a basic phone can’t be changed, iseemail is limited to offering these features from the service on the network itself. Their answer is to get users to request them with text commands.

To forward an e-mail for example, users will have to start by typing the word “forward” as the first word of their message. Other examples of text commands include “delete”, “reply”,“replyall”, “compose”, ”markunread”, and should you forget what the commands are and need to see the entire list, “help”.

Included in this system is your contacts list which cannot be added to your phone, but rather exists on the network. By typing in the “add” command you can save an e-mail address to the list and the next time you send an e-mail, simply use the person’s name. The service will then look up the name for a match from its list and send you a response text message for you to send back an approval on.

It’s a very cumbersome process, one that harkens back to the way we used computers in the 80’s and early 90’s. Add that to the small screen and limited keypad on a basic cell phone and I don’t see today’s users finding a tolerance for it.

Part of the intended attraction is the lower cost of the service. The e-mails count as text messages and so would fall under a standard text messaging plan, you might just have to pay an extra small monthly fee for the iseemail service itself.

I can see the service generating a large number of messages in a month. Not only is there the back-and-forth between you and the service itself through the exchange of text commands, but because SMS text messages are limited in space, long e-mails are chopped up into several text messages in order to fit. Add that to the spam that will no doubt leak in as, in order for the service to work your phone must be assigned its own e-mail address, and there could be a conflict with text messaging packages that are limited to 250 or 500 messages a month.

To their credit, iseemedia has tried to add every feature they can think of, including attachments. While the text of an e-mail will arrive as a text message, any attachments including graphics, pictures, audio, video, and document files are delivered through the WAP browser. Users click on a link that appears in their text message and it opens the WAP browser where a slick, zoomable interface allows you to access and display a full range of file types.

The problem with this solution is that such content will be charged as data, not as part of the text messaging plan. Since users with very basic phones are unlikely to have data plans, opening attachments could be a costly move.

The company is certainly not without ambition. Their service supports a wide range of e-mail protocols including POP3 and IMAP4 plus popular platforms such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo!. In addition to English, they have support in place for Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Kanji and others. In anticipation that iseemail will resolve its issues and take off, the company is already working on similar services to deliver Twitter and Facebook to low-end phones too.

Currently in talks with a number of wireless carriers around the world, iseemedia is exploring three possible solutions for their service:

The first would be to offer e-mail to low-end cellphones that are currently incapable of using e-mail. I see this as a temporary problem right now as today’s expensive smartphones will become tomorrow’s low-end phones. Eventually all devices will have standard e-mail on them.

The second is to market the service as a low-cost alternative to e-mail. Road warriors worried about the high cost of data roaming could switch over to their text messaging application and use iseemail instead. Not only would this be a savings for the user, but also for the networks as converted e-mails take up less data on the network. Again, the issue here is the cumbersome interface. Smartphone users may be willing to pay more just to avoid the frustration.

Lastly the service might find a home in developing markets or communities in the world where the populace discovered the internet on their phones and not on computers like consumers in the West. With a history of already doing most tasks on their phones, they may adapt more easily to the text commands and limitations of iseemail.

As it exists today I would never use nor recommend iseemail, but after giving the concept some thought I think I have a suggestion as to how it could find a use.

To me the issue is that iseemedia is trying to take a very sophisticated service and add it to a very primitive one. There is a big difference between primitive and simple. Users want simple, but not primitive. They might find more success by going the other way around, finding a use for text messaging in the world of e-mail.

While waiting for their flights in airport lounges I’ve watched executives “power through” their work e-mails, quickly going through ten or twenty of them and responding to them with short answers; yes, no, next Tuesday, only if they pay for the expenses, ask Jody to help you, etc.

Imagine a version of iseemail that would only offer the ability to reply, not compose. Instead of using your regular e-mail service at the airport where the data costs are high, simply open your text messaging application, send a text command to fetch the last twenty messages from your e-mail in box and then “power through” them with short replys. When you arrive at the hotel, you can switch back to regular e-mail and address the more complicated e-mails, attachments, etc.

By limiting the functionality they can keep it simple and focus more on marketing the cost savings of their technology instead. It doesn’t have the same hook or revenue potential as reinventing e-mail itself, but at the end of the day, it’s about what people will use.