? About push

Sure, push means that mail is "pushed" to your phone the second it arrives. Have you ever heard of "push notifications"? These are notifications that Apple can push to your phone whenever they want to, and you receive them right away if you are connected to the Internet.

Fetch means that the Mail App looks for new mail during intervals of time. So, for example, you could set an option for Mail to look for new mail every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes, every hour, etc.

Hope this helps!

 

that's correct.
given that your email provider supports push.

which email service are you using?

 

To be explicit, if you have setup gmail as IMAP (using the gmail icon under setup), you'll be getting fetch at whatever interval you select.

If you have setup gmail as exchange (using the exchange icon), you'll be getting real-time push.

 

Does anyone know if there is much of a battery life difference between setting up as IMAP and exchange?

 

If you're fetching at regular intervals then fetch will be a real battery killer compared to exchange.

 

Partly depends on the network topology between you and the mail server.

If the network between your cell and the Exchange server gives up connections quicker than say, every 15 minutes, then push can use more battery than a 15 minute fetch, because the device has to ping the server more often to keep the connection alive.

(So-called "push" in this case requires a live connection so the server can send IP packets to your device any time it needs to. In order to keep the connection from timing out, there has to be a message sent every time the connection is about to time out. This could be anywhere from every 5 to 45 minutes. The longer, the better.)

So each user's situation is different. If you're really concerned about battery life, then try to use push all one day, and fetch all another day, keeping everything else the same, and see if there's a huge difference where you normally live and work.

In real life, some of us don't care that much, because the benefit of instant mail alerts (via push) outweighs almost all battery considerations. If, on the other hand, you rarely get email, then it's worth testing.

 

My corporate email uses exchange. I left it set to push and it started draining my battery. I switched it to fetch and it uses a lot less battery than it did under push. I imagine it's something our mail server does that caused the battery drain. I leave the fetch interval set as slow as possible. Meanwhile my push personal email comes through MobileMe and I've never noticed that it hurt my battery life.

 

Fetch always uses less batter than push (because it is not constantly getting updated in real time)

For my e-mail I use fetch for all my e-mail (set to 1 hour) except for my work exchange account I have set to manual because I get dozens of e-mails everyday

 

Anyone who uses "always" in a push/fetch discussion is always wrong. And no, don't point out the irony, that won't make your comment right.

Too many factors are involved to say something like that.