Updated: Apple iPhone – Push Mail against GMail
Man, if you’ve heard all that fancy stuff about Blackberry devices with their neat capabilities you really want to have that too. (Don’t you?)
So i was starting my search for a provider that would give me this stuff for my new iPhone (which i love) . I brought up the ususal suspect with the search terms “iphone push gmail” which seemed obvious to me. Well, after some browsing through the results i came up with quite some providers (Synchronica, Cortado, emoze) that told to support what i needed. After testing Synchronica i figured out that it synced only my new mails on my device but not vice-versa, nor did emoze. As i was already frustrated and Cortado didn’t even support GMail sync i stopped my tries.
Today, however i was taking the underground to work and started to think about this problem. When i came to the office i digged a bit more into the problem. I was thinking about splitting up the problem in two parts.
So i was first trying to find out if push-mail would be a possibility for the iPhone anyhow. As always, Apple maintains a low profile when talking about the tech specs of the iPhone. So i couldn’t really figure out if the iPhone supports any of the current push-mail standards except a lonely forum report stating that it supports IMAP IDLE. If this is the truth it would be at least possible to sync an IMAP IDLE capable mailbox (which GMail isn’t). Yet i wonder why Apple doesn’t seem to mention this in it’s press releases.
The second problem is more a Google Mail problem, than a iPhone as Google didn’t even include IMAP support to GMail till now. So also no possiblity for IMAP IDLE here. I was thinking about alternatives here and came up with something like “Hey Google has APIs for everything“. Well, after a short look i figured out that they left GMail way behind. There is only a small RSS feed ability – nothing more. That means to me, there is no reliable way to tell Google Mail for example, that a mail is read, etc. Sure, you can hack something that does this via CURL, etc. But that’s not what i want to, i don’t want to change my implementation every time GMail get’s a new fancy look (which indeed didn’t happen quite often, yet 
).
Finally i found some quite complicated construction to bring some sort of IMAP support to GMail. As i don’t think this is a passable way for the broader audience (including me) i didn’t give it a try. If you have and can report how it works i would however appreciate it.
My plans for this, if i found a way to sync to GMail – are, to implement a solution that does what i want via Apache James.
Why i write all this? Dunno. Well, i do. I wanted to bring the background stuff i already figured out to some bigger audience which maybe enables us to find a solution for that. So, your comments are more than welcome.
Update: As announced earlier this day, Google introduces IMAP for GMail. Problem solved, i’d say.
October 12, 2007 at 11:27 am
October 12, 2007 at 12:02 pmwnagele
i’ve found a library that intends to bring an api to gmail. it’s last update was in 2004 however. i’ll try to give it a try soon.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jgmail
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May 31, 2008 at 10:08 pmJeremy
Push mail to the iPhone.
I have been trying to figure this out for quite sometime as well. And I notice that I am writing this to you about 7 months after your post. I took a rudimentary approach. I use Gmail and decided to setup mail forwarding to a Yahoo! account I created. Since Yahoo! does directly support push to the iPhone I was able to start receiving pushed emails. I set my reply to in my yahoo account to my gmail account and haven’t had an issue since. I’m not a coder so this was the best I could do. I thought I would share. You may not even care at this point as I am sure you have found a proper fix.
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June 1, 2008 at 1:44 amwnagele
thanks for the idea – but as you can see at my update at the bottom of the post gmail has imap support now. this totally solved my problem.
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June 30, 2008 at 8:02 pmManni
Well, how does IMAP solve your problem regarding lack of push-functionality? IMAP does not necessarily mean push. As of today, there is still no push functionality on the iPhone with GMAIL. Only Yahoo works.
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July 1, 2008 at 1:36 amPete
Anyone any idea whats special about yahoo that it can do push? What protocol is it using?
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July 16, 2008 at 3:21 amkmcital
Similar to Jeremy’s idea, I have a working configuration with gmail and mobileme. See here:
http://kmcital.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/iphone-20-mobileme-and-push-gmail-working/
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August 7, 2008 at 5:50 pmdizzy
I’m using ymail like Jeremy as it’s free and mobileme isn’t.
I setup filters to only forward email I want to know about on a “push” basis and set it to “read” as to not show up as new mail on my gmail account when going into the general mail app. One thing I don’t understand is how you set the SMTP on yahoo to gmail? I don’t see anyway to do this, but I just change the FROM address before sending to achieve this.
Here are the details of my setup on my blog:
http://whenwillapple.com/saywhy/2008/07/23/my-iphone-gmail-push-work-aroundthanks-ymail/
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February 18, 2009 at 2:04 amPortable Air Conditioners.net
I use Gmail on my iphone 3g..and it always worked fine, until all of a sudden it stopped working. It would not update my email and just say “connecting….” and then “cannot connect to imap.google.com”. It was so frustrating! I tried several things, none of which worked. Finally I got a tip from someone online to just go into gmail on my computer and change my password to something more secure. Up until then my password had just been a simple word, but after changing it to something with a number and longer word in it, gmail worked on my phone again. But gosh it was so frustrating when it wasn’t working.
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July 8, 2009 at 3:19 pmSteve Haran
Install GrowlMail on the Mac. Install Prowl on the Mac and Iphone.
You then get email growl alerts from the mac being pushed to the iphone.
This simulates push email perfectly!
Steve.
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