IPhone Push Notifications for any IMAP account | Hacker News Reader

IPhone Push Notifications for any IMAP account

msgpush.com

21 pointstalison23 comments

The privacy concerns here are obvious... Neat service otherwise, but I don't trust too many people with my e-mail.

People seem to be very loose with their account info these days when it comes to convenience.

You'd never give your password to someone if they asked you in person, but if it's a website, that's a whole different scenario.

You wouldn't. I wouldn't. We are not most people.

Many people will give their password to anyone who asks, and most will give their password to someone who offers them a candy bar.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3639679.stm

An open source self-hosted implementation of this would be terrific :) I too would not trust this service, it seems pretty fly-by-night.

Zarafa's Z-Push might be what you're after — it emulates an MS ActiveSync server front-end against various backends including IMAP. It's written in PHP and you can grab the code at https://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=... or find out more about the company at http://www.zarafaserver.de/

I suspect this feeling comes from the shoddy design. Throw a few rounded corners at in, and some glossy buttons, and people will be all "oohh Web 2.0".

Yeah, I'd love to be able to add real push notifications to postfix.

I think you meant something like dovecot, instead. Postfix is an MTA, not an imap daemon. I'd very much like to see a dovecot extension to do push.

Yes sorry:( Up too late on a deployment. Dovecot is great.

Has it been entirely proven that the iPhone only checks IMAP accounts on a 15 minute interval? I've never stop watched it but I feel like it's much shorter. I've seem some speculation that it depends on wifi vs. 3G connectivity. It seems to me that messages show up in my desktop client (IMAP-IDLE aware) only a few minutes before they hit my iPhone. My gut feeling is the iPhone is probably 3 or 4 minutes behind my desktop client (IMAP-IDLE aware) Has anyone been able to confirm or deny the 15 minute interval or is it just my imagination and poor sense of time?

(I do have a separate MobileMe e-mail account account as well. Perhaps it changes the IMAP intervals system wide?)

Doesn't work if you're also using Google Sync. The iPhone will only let you add one "Exchange" account.

We just have to wait till Google implements push for Gmail.

Far as I can tell, this isn't an exchange account, just an unread email badge.

I say far as I can tell, because during the registration, when I saw they were asking for password instead of using SSO, I abandoned.

If you choose to disregard the privacy issue, don't get too attached. Their privacy policy states that they plan to charge for the service once it's out of beta:

"Information collected may include: contact information such as your name, phone/cell numbers (during the course of technical support incidences), e-mail address(es), e-mail password(s) (to monitor your mail account for new messages), an identifying question for security check purposes, billing information (if you choose to join our service post Beta) and information related to those of our service(s) in which you have expressed an interest."

I really wish they had any information about the technical details behind this. Do they mirror your email on their exchange server or something?

They don't mirror your mail, you receive a pushed mail on the msgpush account telling you new mail has arrived. You still have to read it on your regular account

What protocol do they use on the msgpush account? Push IMAP? Something else the iPhone supports?

Yes, "something else" the iPhone supports in OS 3.0, which is "push notifications".

These is a background notification service any iPhone app can use that can show a text message on the screen and update a counter (aka "badge") on the icon of an app that isn't running.

Push notification in iPhone OS 3.x is not to be confused with Exchange or ActiveSync so-called Push email.

no they kinda fake exchange (I don't know the technical details behind it) ,since push IMAP is not supported on the iPhone.

Is there a jailbreak way to modify the settings so it checks it faster than every 15 minutes?

I don't understand - isn't this push? Shouldn't you be notified immediately, rather than pulling every 15 minutes?

yes, i remember doing this on the 1st gen iphone. just modify the plist for the mail settings and change the 15 to 5 or something else. i remember there being a plutil binary in cydia to be able to do this while ssh'd into the iphone.

This service/app will fall apart as soon as Apple adds this feature.

Apple would prefer for you to use Mobile Me.

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