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Comment by nwh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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?

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.

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