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Push Email Support for .Mac Accounts on iPhone 2.0

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Apr 12, 2001
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TUAW reports that the latest iPhone 2.0 beta that was just released added the ability to provide "Push" email services from your .Mac account.

"Push" email allows the server to push email down to your phone when it arrives. The alternative method involves the iPhone itself polling the server at regular intervals, resulting in a significant battery drain over time.


Article Link
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2008/05/08/push-email-support-for-mac-accounts-on-iphone-2-0/
NP3 said:
Interesting! I knew the basics of Push...but somehow missed the battery benefits of it.
Click to expand...

i'd have thought the battery benefits are dependant upon the amount of email you recieve, no?
if you recieve 10 emails every 30 minutes, then surely it's more cost effective to just poll every 30 minutes and get those ten in a batch, no?

whereas if you recieve 10 emails throughout the whole day, then push is better i guess.
how does it work? are emails sent over the phone network then? or is a signal sent to the phone to tell it to connect to the email server?
 
wow, a reason to actually buy a .mac account. throw in at least 60gb of storage for the iDisk and i might go for it. for now i will use gmail and use my wd passport drive.

push would be useful. i rarely get more than 10 emails a day. i keep my gmail account a secret so that it doesn't get whored out to a million businesses with spam. that's what my yahoo account is for.

it would be nice to get emails pushed over. my iPhone likes to fetch my emails on some days, but most of the time it doesn't auto download and i have to manually check. this has caused me to show up to several cancelled classes. suck.

so my school email, when i go to log in on the web, says "provided by microsoft exchange server 2003." isn't the iphone software 2.0 supposed to support push with exchange?
 
If the cost of .Mac is a concern. Walk into an Apple Store, look for any of the 5-20 people buying a Mac at the same time, give them 70 bucks, (remember, buy a Mac save 30% on .Mac.). Go upgrade your storage to 60 gb with the money you saved and a bit more and begin the painfully slow backup of your entire music library or iBook HD (I'm guessing). All you need is 10, you should just back up documents, host websites with a few pictures, use it as a flash drive and you're all set.
 
This is great. I'd love to see gmail/google apps push email support as well, since I have both .mac and a google apps email accounts.
 
This was the no brainer that I have been waiting to read.

Just getting my iCal info sync'd up on my iPhone is one of the only reasons I really need to even plug in. .Mac does it great "over the air" with my few computers so it only makes sense to extend that to the iPhone.
 
Calendar items pushed on .Mac

I wish it could push calendar items too. I update my calendar on my MBP but sync my phone with my mini. It would be great to get calendar changes as they happen!
:)
 
if apple's push implementation is anything like Microsoft DirectPush or whatever they call it on Windows Mobile, then what the OP said is absolutely the opposite of reality.

DirectPush drains a battery faster because it basically has to maintain a connection to the tower all the time. We've seen battery life *increase* by disabling directpush and turning on regular checking at 10 minute intervals here at my company.

However, if apple does something where getting a push message is equivalent to getting a phone call or text message (as opposed to Microsoft's implementation of keeping a constant connection), then yes, battery life could be increased. I fail to see how it would be able to do this over Wi-fi, though, because with Wi-Fi you would have to maintain a connection all the time for push to work (a "pushed" request is not going to be able to go through a NAT'ed firewall without there being an existing connection, and hence draining your battery).

I think we need to see some real-world results before making assumptions like this.

Edit: My post sounds really negative. Actually i'm excited for push email, with or without battery changes for the positive or negative. Especially Exchange support...
 
Holy egg salad Batman!!

Damn, I need to tell people to switch to emailing me at my .Mac account if this is going to be in 2.0! I thought IMAP was cool, I'll take Push email plz, k thx! :)
 
This could be very interesting news indeed. Is it possible that Apple is going to make a move against Exchange? They've already added a Calendar server to OS X Server. Is corporate email next? Perhaps they are going to position OS X Server as a much cheaper alternative corporate email/calendar server...
 
Yahoo Push

I have a Yahoo account that I push to my iPhone. It doesn't get a lot of traffic so I am not getting a lot of pushes. I don't have a connection most of the work day so it must not be trying to keep a constant connection with the server. If I do have a message waiting to be pushed and I wander into coverage while at work it comes down and my phone does it alert to notify me. I would love to get my gmail account to push but I wouldn't want to give up the IMAP. I love having my various email clients all pointing to the same email database.

I suspect that the reason push is a battery save over (or no worse than) fetch is that every time you poll the server with fetch and don't download a message, you have wasted some battery. If there is a message to fetch or one is getting pushed, it is probably pretty close to the same battery usuage to do either process. Just my guess though.
 
iCal

toomuchmac said:
This was the no brainer that I have been waiting to read.

Just getting my iCal info sync'd up on my iPhone is one of the only reasons I really need to even plug in. .Mac does it great "over the air" with my few computers so it only makes sense to extend that to the iPhone.
Click to expand...

Agreed, if it "pushes" iCal - this is a huge feature upgrade!
Will have to sync even less, just for the rare iTunes sync!
 
Is there (or where will be) any way for a POP account to get pushed, as well?
 
It's about time! I never understood why Apple didn't make the changes necessary for this to have been included since launch--I mean it's kind of sad when they have to tell you to go to yahoo to get your e-mail because they aren't willing to do whatever it takes for your paid account.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

This will be really nice. I hope it does have improvements in battery life.
 
violaboy said:
I wish it could push calendar items too. I update my calendar on my MBP but sync my phone with my mini. It would be great to get calendar changes as they happen!
:)
Click to expand...

If you have .Mac you can edit the MBP, sync, .Mac updates Mini with the changes, iPhone gets the changes when you sync with the mini.
 
It unfortunately doesn't support contacts and iCal...yet. I think that would be a plus to be able to push sync those items. I think I might spend the money for a .mac account just for that.


Walk into an Apple Store, look for any of the 5-20 people buying a Mac at the same time, give them 70 bucks, (remember, buy a Mac save 30% on .Mac.).
Click to expand...

Or you could go to Amazon.com and buy it for $70. That way, you don't look like the cheap bastard standing outside an Apple store trying to save $30. ;)
 
what's the big deal if you have IMAP or POP set up to check every 5 minutes?
*edit* just realized the iphone only allows you 15, 30, or every hour. if it was every 5 minutes i think that'd be fine.
 
mdwsta4 said:
what's the big deal if you have IMAP or POP set up to check every 5 minutes?
*edit* just realized the iphone only allows you 15, 30, or every hour. if it was every 5 minutes i think that'd be fine.
Click to expand...

if it was every five minutes it'd give you horrid battery life. push helps conserve the battery life since it doesn't have to check the server.

glad i have a .mac account, might actually be useful now.
 
EagerDragon said:
If you have .Mac you can edit the MBP, sync, .Mac updates Mini with the changes, iPhone gets the changes when you sync with the mini.
Click to expand...

Yes that works but the ideal way for most of us would be for the iPhone to sync with the .mac account (contacts/calendars etc) without having to plug it into the computer.
 
I've never understood why contacts and calendar aren't synced over the air. Even my rusty old Sidekick syncs OTA.
 
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