JailBreak and IMAP/Push

[MaxusHastings]

Hey Everyone!

I have my iPhone 3G which is great, but i HATE the fact that apple locks down the IMAP IDLE functionality (which as i understand, enables "Push" like functionality) to "friendly partners" such as yahoo or their own mobile me service for example.

What i would really like to know is that if i were to go down the jailbreaking route for my iPhone (i currently have it on the standard 2.2.1 Firmware) will i have the ability to enable this feature so that my iPhone can start to fetch email from other accounts (specifically gMail)? and not have to "Poll" it every 15/30 minutes as it does now.

I know i can do the usual forwarding gmail to Yahoo and so on and so forth, but then i loose the nice inbox sync between all my devices which kinda sucks . Plus i hear that jailbreaking lets me do lots of other cool-funky things!

Any help or advice would be more than welcomed from anyone!

Cheers,

Maxus

 

[DannyBres]

lol
What makes you think you cant use any imap server cause you can and Gmail is a "friendly partner" just go

Settings>Mail,Contacts,Calendars> Add account > Gmail

or use Other and you can sync with any IMAP server...

and i dont understand why you dont want it to check every 15 mins surely thats best o you get ur emails?

 

[MaxusHastings]

lol
What makes you think you cant use any imap server cause you can and Gmail is a "friendly partner" just go

Settings>Mail,Contacts,Calendars> Add account > Gmail

or use Other and you can sync with any IMAP server...

and i dont understand why you dont want it to check every 15 mins surely thats best o you get ur emails?

Hey Danny!

Thanks for the reply, hopefully the below clears a few things up.

While it is true that the iPhone supports IMAP out of the box, it doesnt allow the IDLE function (which acts like PUSH email giving blackberry like functionality). This feature means that i could turn off the polling (15/30 minutes) and the iPhone would only fetch mail when the server sends a heartbeat to say there is a new message to get. This is the same functionality that Yahoo Mail, mobile me and exchange offers on the iPhone, but for some weird (and i am sure wonderfull) reasoning at apple, they disabled it on any other service (gMail, Other IMAP Servers, etc).

The benifits of having this means that i get a nice juice battery life (not having to poll the server every 15/30 minutes) and instant(ish) email being delivered to my Phone without having to wait for it to Pull from the server or with me having to initiate a sync manually.

Hope that helps a little more

Cheers,

Maxus

 

[CrzyCanuck72]

I don't think there's any hack to enable push email for accounts that don't support it out of the box, the best you can do is SSH into the phone and decrease the minimum polling time from every 15 minutes to... whatever you want.

See this thread for how to do that: http://www.modmyi.com/forums/file-mods/504211-modding-push-email-selectable-settings.html

 

[The Admiral]

IMAP IDLE seems to work just fine with the courier-imap server i run from my closet. i don't recall making any special email deals with apple, either... this is the first i have heard of this "friendly partners" business.

 

[MaxusHastings]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the links and information so far.

I am not sure if this is maybe a restriction in the UK or not, but if you google this it seems lots of people have the same problem. To confirm it i setup a Yahoo email account and Gmail IMAP on my iPhone...and i can confirm this is the case as the iphone identifies them differently:

Fetch New Data > Advanced:

MaxusHastings (gMail) = Fetch
MaxusHastings (yMail) = Push

It treats them both differently with no ability to change it sadly and if i send an eMail to the newly created yMail account it gets instantly delivered to the iPhone, whereas gMail will take anything upto 15 minutes to be delivered (due to the sync-settings).

Here is a good link from the google group: http://groups.google.com/group/Gmai...n/browse_thread/thread/c245b0e778031d50?pli=1

Although it specificaly mentions "Google Enabling Push Email" is not quite true, as usinga locally hosted IMAP server produces the same results too

Cheers,

Maxus

 

[The Admiral]

i should clarify. with my home IMAP server, i have it set to fetch once every hour but the messages arrive immediately, as though they are being delivered on demand.