What is imap push

I figure that would be better so that only one IDLE connection is required for an account. Is there a way to find out which email goes with which folder in this case? Take a look at all Mail. I am using idle with Gmail and it works flawlessly for a couple of hours. No data received. Basically, it means that either server disconnected or you have had a small connection problem — which is understandable if you maintain a connection for several hours. Not all servers report such changes. Unseen search.

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Podcast Do polyglots have an edge when it comes to mastering programming Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Related 7. It wasn't always the case that this was possible but now it is becoming the norm for hand-held devices. P-IMAP is designed to be more hand-held device friendly.

There are many commands added for doing things important to small devices with limited storage and connection speed - like managing attachments.

Need Help? Apple however chose not to implement IDLE, probably because of the battery life problems. Instead they do regular polling, but the minimum poll interval is 15 minutes. This works well and keeps battery usage in check, but is not quite the timely response that most people are after. When used in conjunction with their iCloud service however, iOS Mail can do instant notifications, and its this that most people think of as push.

It works pretty much exactly like FastMail's Android app. Upon seeing that the IMAP server offers support for Apple's push mechanism, the app sends the server a list of folders that its interested in knowing about changes for, and a push token. Just as described above, when something changes the IMAP server sends a message through Apple's push service, which causes the Mail app to wake and make IMAP requests to get the changes.

Even if it drops, as it might if there's been no new mail for hours, it can just reconnect and ask for the changes. Of course, this mechanism is limited to the iOS Mail app with servers that support this extension. Last year, Apple were kind enough to give us everything we need to implement this feature for FastMail , and it's fast become one of our most popular features.

One of the first systems to support "push mail" as its commonly understood was Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync, so it rates a mention. Originally used on Windows Mobile as early as to synchronise with Exchange servers, it's still seen often enough, particularly on Android devices which support it out-of-the-box. There's a lot that we could say about ActiveSync, but as a push technology there's nothing particularly unusual about it. The main difference between it and everything else is that it doesn't have a vendor-provided push service.

Ultimately, the ActiveSync "service" on the device has to regularly poll any configured Exchange servers to find out about new mail and signal this to any interested applications. While not as efficient as having the OS do it directly, it can come pretty close particularly on Windows and Android which allows long-lived background services.

In terms of push, they work on exactly the same concept as IMAP - the app requests notifications for a list of calendars and addressbooks and presents a push token. The server uses that token and informs the push service, which passes the message through.

The OS wakes the app and it goes back to the server and asks for updates. Sadly, the state of "push" for mail is rather fragmented at the moment. To do push in a really good and battery-friendly way, you're tied to vendor-specific push channels. Time will tell if these experiments will go anywhere. These are the kind of things that require lots of different clients and servers to play with and see what works and what doesn't.

That's not something we can do by ourselves, but if you're a mail client author and you'd like to be able to do better push than what IMAP IDLE can give you, you should talk to us!

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