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I recently did exactly this. I'm heading to DefCon next week and the Classic is a nice hands-off high security device I can use for just about my email and little else. Did the same last year with an older 'Berry as well and it helped me to enjoy the conference rather than my phone.

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Email still works without carrier/BB support for push email?

Yes. I've been using a Blackberry Classic for over a year now ("upgraded" from an old Nokia Symbian phone). Does plain IMAP (TLS 1.2), with IMAP IDLE support just fine. Only annoying "feature" of the email client is that it insists on sending HTML mail by default, to send text/plain you have to set it per message/thread.

To add, the old reliance on this was because older Blackberries (<= OS 7) needed to be assigned to a BIS server at the carrier. With OS 10, they work differently. There are core BB 10 servers that are set to be shut down Dec 31, 2019 though, and it's not really certain what the devices will be like after that point.

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