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It's like that because mobile clients need cooperation from the server to have push notifications, and you can't have IMAP servers cooperate in that regard :-) so the outlook servers fetch the mail for you and then send you the notifications.

I wouldn't have microsoft read my email either, of course. Thankfully in windows you have dozens of clients to choose from.

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So you poll instead of getting a push?

Thats what my phone does. I could have seen the value of this 10-15 years ago but I don’t see the point now.

It isn’t like this would magically get rid of the delay either, their servers still have to poll before they can send you that notification.

You can't realiably poll from a mobile phone. Your app may not be allowed to execute any code, let alone make a network request for hours, or maybe forever.

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