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Comment by benguild | Hacker News Reader

Um, what the hell? Isn't Exchange the only way to get true "Push" email and events in the iPhone's Mail + Calendar clients?

I've been using Exchange exclusively instead of IMAP for Calendar and Mail "Push" since I switched to iPhone....

This is absolutely outrageous.

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| This is absolutely outrageous.

It's annoying, but calling it "outrageous" is just silly. How much do you pay them and what did they promise you for your money?

I have got used to this great free stuff too, but I don't believe I deserve unlimited free stuff, and I won't get all huffy when they take it away.

I pay by letting them dig through my email, calendar and GDocs and resell data advertisers. I have little doubt those impressions of ads hanging in front of my face in GMail all day long earn them 5 bucks a month.

And they don't exactly refrain from mining my personal data once I pay for their service with cash. So, it is little short of outrageous.

I very much doubt they make 5 bucks a month per user. Maybe 5c.

Thinking about it, sure, 5 bucks is outrageously much. Didn't give it enough thought, my bad.

Anyway, my major concern is that somehow my data stored with 'enterprise-grade' paid service still gets mined and resold to 3rd-parties. I'm being forced to pay while still it's me that's being the product. Privacy is a hefty enough price to pay for a personal email.

If you are paying for Google Apps, you can disable ads.

But can you disable data mining? Honest question. I don't use them.

My point exactly. Google Apps TOS clearly grants them rights to mine the data.

"resell data advertisers."

FYI that's not how google makes money.

Yeah, I know. It's not literally data, it's knowledge about me and ability to target me they sell. Processed data.

I believe you can get push support through IMAPs IDLE extension, but I've had a hard time finding an IMAP server that supports it and isn't a fully fledged corporate system.

Gmail supports IDLE according to a quick search. I wonder if battery life will be adversely impacted because now you will have another persistent socket connection to Google instead of reusing the push notification socket that Exchange syncing used.

I've tried this before and the iPhone didn't support it

I you're on an iPhone there's already a couple of other push connections that keep active too. Apples push notification service is just long-polling HTTP for example, I don't think it shares the same connection with iMessage either.

I can't pretend to know anything about IMAP or Exchange, but one would assume that push uses less than polling the email server every 5-15 minutes.

Interesting. I wasn't sure if Apple multiplexed their persistent sockets or not. I wonder how the baseband optimizes persistent connections. I suppose it doesn't have to do much of anything since the sockets aren't actively sending data.

I don't know really, I just remember seeing a bunch of long polling connections when I was using an interception proxy last. Some to Google, and some to Apple. I can't imagine the carriers particularly enjoy it, I imagine the connection drops and is re-established on quite a regular basis, it must put load on their towers.

This is the reason I wrote http://suhastech.com/mail

I use an Android phone and I get an email notification via text messages.

Works well in India, not so much in USA (due to the 140 char limit in Twilio, message concatenation is not allowed)

I'm using IMAP IDLE for a few years now on my android phones. Works like a charm and is not slower then ActiveSync (which i also used some months, on the same account). I get email notifications between 1 and 10 seconds after they are in my inbox.

Yep, me too. Courier IMAPD (at least the Debian stable packages) works just fine. But where's the equivalent software for tasks, calendar and contacts?

Dovecot supports IDLE, but you won't get email instantly unless you instruct your MTA to use /usr/lib/dovecot/deliver to write to your maildirs.

http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA

It seems the iOS email client doesn't support the IDLE extension. This is the same case with the Android e-mail client (https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=23971)

What about the gmail for iOS app?

It's not strictly using any form of IMAP, its a web view with push notifications from Googles servers.

This is the same case with the Android e-mail client

Just to put this out there, K-9 is the fork of the andriod mail client you really want to be using, it does IDLE.

Keep in mind that Google has to pay MS so that you can use some non-standard MS protocol. There are alternatives.

How is this outrageous? Why should they spend money to support a rival's platform? iOS' integration/sync services are terrible, even with their own iCloud. I've been nothing short of blown away by the streamlined integration with Google accounts on my new Android phone.

I'm sure they want you to use the iOS Gmail app. While it doesn't support true "Push" email, it does receive push notifications which is a pretty good approximation.

It fairly awful if you spend any serious time with it.

The badge on the app reflects the unread count of every account that is active in the app, but even when you open it, there's utterly no indication of which inbox has unread email. I've just three accounts added to their app, and its already a hunting game finding where that mysterious (1) is coming.

Most of the interface feels weird too. You can't slide to archive an email in the new version, as it opens the siding panel. The behaviour is still hidden away though, tap and hold and slide tricks the old gesture into working again. Ticking and tapping for every interaction feels clunky.

It's not a replacement for proper psush email in Apple's Mail.app. I'd host my own push email, but I've struggled finding anything that is lightweight and supports IMAPs IDLE command (allowing for push email).

Fully agree. While you get new mail notifications, the messages are not downloaded to the app in the background as they hit your inbox. Every time you swipe the notification to view the message, you have to wait a good ten seconds for the app to load and then retrieve the message, assuming you have the good fortune for it to even send you to the right message (it's been spotty at best for me).

I could get over the interface oddities as that's mostly a matter of aesthetics, but it's nowhere near as fast as Mail.app to actually open your new email, and that's the killer for me.

I think this was discussed on another HN thread. The app is native to handle the push notifications, but loads a webview to handle the actual display of the inbox. And it seems like it loads the webview every time you view the app. Lots of Googly magic is probably happening in all of that JavaScript.

The load time led me to delete the app. But I can't get mad about the loss of push to mail.app. TANSTAAFL.

I agree that the UI needs some improvements. But for me, the Gmail app is the only way to get consistent push notifications for new emails. The iOS Mail.app would always stop getting new mails if I don't use my phone for a while. Also you can't manage labels in iOS Mail, or specify a different From address.

FYI: Slide from right-to-left on a message to bring up the "archive" button.

I'm still really upset about this. If I update a calendar item on my desktop, it won't update on my device until after a considerable delay or whatever without this. Same with email, I won't necessarily get notified of emails.

This is making my move to Android more and more inevitable, actually. However, for a horrendous reason.

Please reread what you just wrote.

Seems to me that this is _exactly_ the reason google is doing this - to push you over to Android.

You're not paying for gmail/apps, so you're the product, and the product is now being ported to Android. It's really that simple.

They say existing devices are OK, but is Apple sending the UDID or another unique identifier to the server? Would restoring an iTunes Backup to a replacement device remove your support for Exchange due to the hardware being different?

That would totally suck! If it's locked down by account, I guess that's OK since existing accounts would be grandfathered.

From what I saw in IIS logs on an Exchange server and in MAPI stores, every EAS client registers with the Exchange server and creates a folder there to track its's state somehow.

So Google can surely change their EAS implementation to not register new clients.

If you have an iCloud email address, it is "push" - i.e. as soon as the email comes in to your inbox it is in the mail app.

Sure, but who uses iCloud as their primary email provider? I certainly don't trust Apple to get it right, given their experiences with internet services. They've already changed people's email addresses as least twice, which is beyond uncool (mac.com -> me.com -> icloud.com). Unlike your username to their services, your email address is tied into all sorts of other third-party services (not to mention address books) and is incredibly painful to update.

I agree - just pointing out however that Exchange is not the _only_ way to get push email on your iphone. For example, if you are using Gmail, you can setup a filter to forward email to your iCloud email address. That way you can continue to use Gmail like you normally would, but get "Push" email on your iphone.

Apple didn't discontinue mac.com and me.com domains for existing accounts.

My @me.com address still works fine, I just now also have an @icloud.com pointing to it too. I believe that's the case for @mac.com as well. Don't worry, there'd be uproar if Apple took people's email addresses from them :)

Personally, I'm a bit of a hypocrite, because I use my gmail as my main account, despite being far more comfortable with a service I can pay for (in the past, that was MobileMe) and know I can get customer service on the phone. Honestly, once Apple can show they've got their act together for more than a few years I'll probably switch...

Why don't you just pay someone reasonable to host an ActiveSync compatible mail server or mailbox for you?

>Sure, but who uses iCloud as their primary email provider?

I do.

>They've already changed people's email addresses as least twice, which is beyond uncool (mac.com -> me.com -> icloud.com)

And they all still work.

>Unlike your username to their services, your email address is tied into all sorts of other third-party services (not to mention address books) and is incredibly painful to update.

Since the aliases still work, as mentioned above, this is not an issue at all. Personally I prefer to use the me.com domain as it's short. It still works and the services that I use with me still work, I continue to get email from them. The same is true with .mac addresses.

No, it's not the only way to get true push email/events. IMAP gives you true push as well. So just use IMAP.

I am sorry, but this is not true. IMAP as a protocol does not support push notifications. There are extension for IMAP that supports push, but they are not widely supported.

If you had iCloud email, would you be just as upset that Apple doesn't support push notifications to Android?

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