Three have had two mobile email offerings for yonks: Mobile Mail, which gets you 10MB from your own pop server for £2.50 a month and Mobile Office Mail which gets 1GB from Exchange for £5 a month. This seems suspiciously close to what you're describing.

Forgive my stupidity, but doesn't this mean that you can just push all your traffic through an ssl tunnel, as long as it's remote endpoint is on port 993 (imaps)?

Just reconfigure those "ssl vpn's" that have become so trendy recently ;-)

It's similar but with the 10MB, that's all you get, 10MB. This new one gives unlimited email access with attachments included, they could easily be a lot more than 10MB. I originally had that and frequently went over but by paying a fiver, for the 1GB X-Series Sliver thing, I have never come close ,except for the times I've used it as a modem (which they don't like). I use it a lot every day for all sorts of things, reading ElReg, watching YouTube, banking, eBay, PrOn and use about half my allowance.

This service is for people who ONLY want to email and rather than pay a fiver for 1GB that they won't use, they pay half that so that they can email as much as they like. Personally I can't stand the MobileMail malarky and prefer checking my GMail account every couple of hours or so. MobileMail seems like it'd be ok for people who haven't heard of Opera Mini but if you use it why bother with Mobile Mail?

Paris, cos I'd pay £2.50 for unlimited access.

Yup.

£5 on 3-mobile gets you unlimited ("fair use") data. So for £2.50 you can use GoogleMaps,

All-in, I average £25pm and use my phone indiscriminately for calls, texts & data.

Woulda been the same on T-Mobile Web'n'Walk (and I nearly went with 'em) but 3 had the phone I wanted (SE K770i).

Reception is fine, btw. I've started reading the newspaper online on the train to and from work, GMaps has repeatedly proven to be dead useful (in conjunction with quickie web searches for postcodes), and of course, GMail is the icing on the cake.

Only small gripe is with the ubiquitous branded soft key shortcuts.

see the various posts on

http://www.recommendedbuys.co.uk/services/mobile-broadband-suppliers/3-mobile-broadband.htm

3 should be investigated for mis-selling of their broadband service, I very much doubt if the email offering will be any better