Why no push for Gmail?

[ipoddin]

I have a Gmail account setup on my phone. I've enabled push in settings and i have IMAP support on in Gmail. In the push settings on the phone, when you click "advanced" it lists all of my mail accounts and what setting I have for push or fetch. My yahoo and .mac accounts are set for push, but the Gmail account does not allow for push. Only selections are fetch and manual. What's up with that?

 

[DeaconGraves]

Gmail does not currently support push. Both Apple and Yahoo use their own servers to push the e-mail out to you.

 

[Cloudane]

Gmail does support Push, in the form of the IMAP IDLE command, which is the industry standard. Go look it up

However Apple and Yahoo (they have a "special" relationship as they both hate M$) insist on their own proprietary "P-IMAP" protocol. Mail.app on the Mac supports IDLE and so you get push on Gmail (try it!) but the iPhone version doesn't.

As to why, depends how cynical and pissed off at Apple you are. Right now I'm thinking they deliberately left out IDLE support because then Gmail Push would work and Google's FREE service (which also offers server side filtering, and even offers From address changing if you use Google Apps) would be quite some considerable competition...