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The fledgling mob-e-mail market is crowded and litigious. No company knows that better than Seven Networks, which lost a high-profile case to Visto, now legally-entangled with market leader Research In Motion, early last month. Three operators deliver Seven-based push e-mail in the U.S., Alltel, Sprint and Cingular.

Today, Hewlett-Packard announced a deal with Seven to market that company's Always-On Mail push e-mail to enterprise customers in Europe through its 170-member strong Preferred Partner network; starting in the UK, Germany, France, Ireland, Austria and Switzerland, before expanding it into the rest of the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) later in 2006.

In addition to e-mail and attachments, the service provides real-time access to contact and calendar information. It is available in an Internet Edition (Yahoo! Mail, Google Mail, etc.), Professional Edition (up to 25 users) and Enterprise Edition (behind the firewall server with 128-bit AES encryption) for HP's iPAQ hw6500 series smartphones, and as an option for the new HP iPAQ hw6900 Mobile Messenger Series.

Always-On Mail is compatible with over 150 other mobile devices running a wide variety of platforms, including BREW, J2ME, Windows Mobile, the Palm OS and Symbian OS.

"The combination of HP's market-leading device and our proven software adds immediate value to customers and revenue opportunities for its channel," said Seven COO Paul Hedman in a statement. "This partnership creates a fantastic range of mobility options for customers across Europe, extending the benefits of mobile e-mail to an ever wider range of users. I believe it will be a great success."

Financial terms were not disclosed. No word on whether the deal will be extended to North America.

Back in May, a federal jury awarded Visto about 3.6 million dollars in damages (19.75 percent in royalties) from Seven, after finding the latter violated three patents and five claims from the former company. Visto took the occasion of its win to file a similar lawsuit against RIM, whereupon Canada's favorite sons filed its own claim; stating it did not infringe on patents held by its competitor and that said patents were invalid to begin with. RIM's next move may be the filing of a suit accusing Visto of infringing on the BlackBerry-maker's own patents.

RIM settled its battle with NTP for $612.5 million dollars in March, in a case where all patents may become invalidated in the end.

As for Seven, its tussle with Visto is far from over. The company plans to file an appeal. And, in the meantime, while one of Visto patents in the case has been upheld, another's been rejected - in a preliminary mode - by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Seven also says it has a 'workaround,' similar to what RIM claimed during its battle with NTP, so its customers won't be affected should the appeals process not go its way. The 'workaround' will be incorporated into upcoming releases of the software and has been validated by third party legal experts, Seven says. "We believe minor alterations of the software will avoid the claims in the future, with no disruption to our customers or the user experience," Harvey Anderson, Seven senior VP of corporate affairs & general counsel, said at the time.

Then there's a Seven countersuit against Visto - filed in the same Texas court - for the infringement of two of its own mobile email patents, which it says predate the Visto patents by the way. A trial in this matter is set for June 2007.

Visto senior VP and co-founder Daniel Méndez emphasized to PDAStreet when we interviewd him in May, however, that all the facts were in and "we prevailed on every single that we brought to trial." He's confident of his company's chances should Seven appeal.