Gmail IMAP or .mac PUSH which is better?

[syclonefx]

Is their any difference between IMAP and the Push Technology .mac uses?

I currently forward all my email accounts to my gmail account. I do this so I can log in to my gmail account anywhere to get my email. I have a .mac account and I am buying a new iPhone when they come out. My question is should I use the gmail account still to get my mail on the iPhone or forward all my account to my .mac account so the messages get Pushed to my phone.

 

[gauchogolfer]

It all depends on how quickly you want to get new mail.

 

[syclonefx]

Speed is not really an issue for me. I'm more concerned with batter life. I get a tons of email daily.

 

[weg]

Speed is not really an issue for me. I'm more concerned with batter life. I get a tons of email daily.

The question is whether you want to poll for it (i.e., check your mail every few hours, when you're up to), or you want to get notified immediately when you've new mail (push).

With respect to productivity, option 1 is surely better, since it allows you to have an uninterrupted workflow. Despite of what we want to believe, few of us are really that important that they have to answer every email within 1 minute.

 

[sharp65]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)

if everything forwards than it will be similar to mobile me except for the calendar/contacts. You will
need to sync with iTunes to update those. I found a program that syncs gcal with outlook for easy syncing.

 

[yg17]

Typically push is better for battery life, since it doesn't have to keep checking. That's why BlackBerries tend to have awesome battery life, RIM's servers check your e-mail account, and when they detect a new one, it gets pushed to the phone, much like a text message, so the phone isn't wasting the battery checking the server every few minutes.

The iPhone isn't "true" push though. It just keeps an IMAP connection open, and uses a feature of IMAP called IDLE that will tell the client there's a new message and it will download it. It requires that constant connection, so it's not real push like BlackBerries, but close enough.