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Last Friday, RIM was scheduled to release BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1 SP5. The main feature touted by RIM in this release was the ability to view HTML-based and Rich Text emails. That’s a rather significant update, and it had many people rather happy. Yes, the text-only emails serve their purpose, but as more and more email clients adopt HTML rendering, it seems that it’s the next natural progression for the BlackBerry. Of course, this isn’t official. But it does follow a certain line of logic. We might not be seeing HTML emails until SP6 is released.

The evidence is presented by Boy Genius Report. They note that the What’s New page for SP5 has changed. Where it previously described support for HTML and Rich Text email, it is now, well, white space.

A commenter on the BGR report says that his RIM contact has confirmed the absence of this much-anticipated feature, and further that it will be released later this year. HTML and Rich Text support for BIS could also be available around that time.

So this is just a heads up for next Tuesday if you use BES 4.1. It’s a sad development, for sure. Maybe RIM will offer an explanation now that the story has broken.

[Boy Genius Report]

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