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Comment by dan1234 | Hacker News Reader

> why Apple Mail can pull Gmail only every 15 minutes is beyond me ...

It used to work, but Google removed Activesync support for free users a while back. you need to use the Gmail app or upgrade to a paid Google Apps plan if you want push support.

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To be fair, Gmail does support the IMAP IDLE extension, which is the standard way of doing push email over IMAP. Mac mail supports it, and it works. (I actually get email notifications on my laptop before my Android phone.)

iOS only supports email push with iCloud or with a Microsoft Exchange server. IMO, this is really on Apple for not supporting the IDLE extension on iOS, rather than Google for not supporting a proprietary protocol for their free users.

> To be fair, Gmail does support the IMAP IDLE extension, which is the standard way of doing push email over IMAP.

IDLE would become a major battery hog on the iPhone, which is why it was never implemented. I don't believe Android supports it natively either.

Why? It works the exact same way as Apple and Google push notification implementations do.

It requires you to have an active connection to the server all the time.

That's just an entry in a table maintained by the kernel. "Active connection" doesn't nescisarily mean data is sent over it. Also, the other poster is right, this is exactly how the other push notifications work.

Of course, but the point is that you have only one connection open (the one to Apple or GCM), not one for each app, one for each imap account, etc. If you let anybody keep a connection alive continuosly you end up with a mess.

Just like Apple Push or Google FCM. How would that work otherwise if not with an idle connection? :)

That is one connection for all apps, not n individual connections.

To be fair, Microsoft asked for licencing fees for ActiveSync used with Gmail. Of course, Google is not going to pay that for the free users, while Gapps users have that included in price (the legacy free Gapps users aren't getting ActiveSync either).

There could be another way for Apple to support push email - they could support third party plug-ins providing protocol support for Mail.app, so Google could implement Gmail support, fastmail jmap support, etc. It is exactly this way, how Gmail app for Android supports ActiveSync.

yep, and my (lame) workaround is to activate notifications for the Gmail app, which I never use. When I get a notification, I then open up the Mail app, which downloads the message. Clunky, but it works (as long as I remember to open the the Gmail app after restarting the phone, which is apparently required for the notifications to work).

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