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Comment by jevinskie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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

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)

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