Email system including an email aggregation server providing distributed polling and related methods

An electronic mail (email) system comprising:

• an email server having mailboxes for storing email messages therein, each mailbox being associated with a unique (UID) identifier;
• a plurality of mobile wireless communications devices;
• and
• an email aggregation server configured to
• poll the mailboxes for email messages, and forward the email messages to respective mobile wireless communications devices,
• divide each of a plurality of repeating polling time intervals into a plurality of subintervals,
• schedule each mailbox for an abbreviated polling for new emails over each subinterval and for a reconciliation polling of all emails uniformly over each polling time interval, the reconciliation polling being more comprehensive than the abbreviated polling, and
• distribute polling of the mailboxes among the plurality of subintervals based upon the UIDs and a total number of the plurality of subintervals.

An electronic mail (email) aggregation server including hardware components for accessing mailboxes on at least one email server, and for communicating with mobile wireless communications devices, comprising:

• a mail user agent module, defined by at least one of the hardware components, for polling mailboxes on at the least one email server for email messages stored therein, each mailbox being associated with a unique (UID) identifier, and forwarding the email messages to respective mobile wireless communications devices;
• and
• a scheduling module, defined by at least one of the hardware components, for
• dividing each of a plurality of repeating polling time intervals into a plurality of subintervals,
• scheduling each mailbox for an abbreviated polling for new emails over each subinterval and for a reconciliation polling of all emails over each polling time interval, the reconciliation polling being more comprehensive than the abbreviated polling, and
• distributing polling of the mailboxes among the plurality of subintervals based upon the UIDs and a total number of the plurality of subintervals.

An electronic mail (email) aggregation method for aggregating email messages from mailboxes on an email server to respective mobile wireless communications devices, each mailbox being associated with a unique (UID) identifier, the method comprising:

• dividing each of a plurality of repeating polling time intervals into a plurality of subintervals;
• scheduling each mailbox for an abbreviated polling for new emails over each subinterval;
• scheduling each mailbox for a reconciliation polling of all emails over each polling time interval, the reconciliation polling being more comprehensive than the abbreviated polling;
• distributing polling of the mailboxes among the plurality of subintervals based upon the UIDs and a total number of the plurality of subintervals;
• polling the mailboxes for email messages based upon the scheduled abbreviated and reconciliation pollings;
• and
• forwarding the email messages to respective mobile wireless communications devices.