And meanwhile the rest of us think you are insane for carrying four seperate phones to do the job of one. Do you have four seperate computers to connect to each of the different servers too?
It's not a matter of money its a matter of efficiency and stupidy. Just because you don't know HOW to accomplish your goal of having four separate views in an intelligent manner and found a truly shoddy workaround doesn't mean you know what you are doing.
You are a hardware salesman, unless your specialty is communication management hardware, and happen to be his manager, I'd say you are generally in the wrong here. The sysadmin's job is to afford with means to manage your communication within the companies acceptable standards (performance, reliability, security, etc, etc). Whether or not you like the company policies isn't his issue; take it up with someone who sets the policies, not enforces them.
Sounds more like you hate when an admin says you can't have something you want but don't need and he doesn't see a financial reason to maintain the cost for you compared to actually using techonology.
Honestly If you are carrying around 4 phones, each tracking the same email address it really seems like you are doing something wrong. Is the email separation really the only reason you have separate phones? I'm curious as to why you couldn't just set up three folders in your IMAP server one for each company and have emails go to the appropriate place.
And since someone said you need to talk to more than one person at once... I call slight bs on that. Unless you are literally holding one phone to your ear and mouth and the other two you rear and holding two unrelated conversations you just don't know how to work with technology.
They have these things called conference calls, three-way calling, and call-waiting if you are bouncing from conversation to conversation. And if you are truly having THAT many different lines going at once, maybe it makes more sense to call from a LANDLINE (shock) on a business phone setup with several different lines and the features you need.
I'm not a salesperson, but I know well enough to not conduct important business on a cellphone if a landline is available.. Nothing like dropping an important call right?
I don't have 4 phones, but having a smartphone and a laptop I feel like its already close enough... Any pop-mail I delete on my phone because I don't want it there in my inbox has to be deleted again on my laptop.. Otherwise I can't remove it from my inbox until my laptop had a chance to read the message and grab a copy. Another reason I hate POP? when you create a new account you have to download EVERY MESSAGE EVER that's still on the server, and they are all unread... lame.
server side mail is the way of the future, and its the only viable mechanism to deal with the bulk of synchronization of devices, there's this phenomenal pattern in software called model-view-controller. You might have heard of it.. The important bit is that you don't have to physically create multiple copies of a MODEL to see different VIEWS of the same data or filtration of the same date. amazing.
I will still stand by my statement, 4 phones is asinine.
I'm not a sysadmin, but its people like you who make me feel sorry for mine.