Working on Gmail PUSH

[TomFrost]

We're discussing in another thread how you can emulate "PUSH" in Gmail by simply having your mail forwarded to a yahoo account.

But that sucks, because you have no way to hit reply on one of those emails and have it come FROM your Gmail account (or whatever FROM address you have set up in Gmail)

I researched what PUSH e-mail really is, and it generally comes down to being an IMAP server with the IDLE extension installed -- just a little function to make your connection to the mail server doesn't time out, so the server can tell you about new mail when it comes in.

So the ultimate setup would be to have Gmail forward your mail to an IMAP account with the IDLE extension, and for the SMTP server in your phone, you'd put Gmail SMTP server. Problem solved! Your E-mail gets pushed directly to your phone, it's spam filtered, and your replies and new mails come from your gmail account! And when you're setting up forwarding, you can make a filter that only forwards mail from: -"[email protected]" -- which eliminates the problem where Gmail sends your sent mail to your phone as though it's new mail!

This is actually incredibly easy. Easier than I thought, because I run a dedicated server with Cylus IMAP4rev1 installed, with IDLEd! So I set everything up with Gmail and my phone just like I described above. Everything checked out. Problem is . . . PUSH isn't working. I'm looking at my server right now and IDLEd is running, so there's only two possibilities for what's going wrong:

1. The iPhone automatically disconnects from the mail server once it's done checking, unless that mail server is yahoo. That would suck.
2. I don't have my mail server set up right. Possible, but not likely.

If you have an IMAP account *anywhere* with IDLE support, please give this a try and report back here! If anyone can find a server that actually *does* PUSH on an iPhone, our problem is solved! As it stands now, though, I just have my phone automatically check mail every 15 minutes, and that's still better than any other solution so far, and solves the Gmail reply glitch. Just wish I had push

[Cody Overcash]

hmmm, i wonder if its worth it to me messing about in the server to enable ldle

[TomFrost]

give it a try! If you're running Cylus, it's really not hard to do. Not sure about any other imap daemon, but it shouldn't be too difficult

[JedixJarf]

Everyone should call up apple support and put in a feature request for Push GMail.

[Criss]

Everyone should call up apple support and put in a feature request for Push GMail.

it's not apple, it's google.

[JedixJarf]

Actually it is Apple, gmail push is available on other mobile devices.

[Criss]

Actually it is Apple, gmail push is available on other mobile devices.

you don't say? how are they doing it, as gmail doesn't currently support push, or IMAP currently?

[JedixJarf]

that's a good question, I have a friend with a pearl and I will see exactly what steps he took.

[Criss]

i did some poking around in my iphone, and i think i may be onto something. does anyone know the imap server for yahoo! ? I tried imap.mail.yahoo.com, and imap.next.mail.yahoo.com (both of which i found by googling) but neither of those would take my login. if i can get the imap logins to work I think I have a solution to all of our gmail push problems.

[Kyle Matthews]

@Criss - thats the other thread Tom was talking about. Already fleshed that out...

And no, Jedi, GMail doesn't support Push, since they don't support IMAP. Now there may be some third-party servers that allow IMAP Gmail access, although my quick Google search didn't show any that were still functioning. So at the moment Tom's idea is the best we have...

[Criss]

@PF - yeah sorry i didn't notice Tom replied to that topic again. hehe in my rapid trolling i overlooked it.

[Kyle Matthews]

Ha no prob. Side note, sorry about the slow load times for a sec there... we were getting a little DDOS. Should be fixed up now.

[Criss]

yeah seems to be tons better. heh, i kept getting DB errors

[Kyle Matthews]

Yah, all taken care of.

[dizzy13]

But that sucks, because you have no way to hit reply on one of those emails and have it come FROM your Gmail account (or whatever FROM address you have set up in Gmail)

That's not actually true. You can click the FROM address and select another account besides the default for that account as seen in the image below.



I also setup filters in gmail to only forward mail to my ymail of my choosing and have the emails that are FWD set to "read" so that they don't show up as new on my gmail account (which I still have setup on my iPhone as manual) when going into the mail app to read the ymail pushed mail. Everything is working great for me so I'm not sure maybe you could give ymail another try

I have all the details of my setup on my blog here:
When Will Apple? » my iPhone gmail push work around…thanks ymail!

If anyone else wants to try with yahoo mail and has question just post back to this thread as I'm going to subscribe to it now.

Hope this helps!

[Rosbaughcr]

Unfortunately, I have MobileMe, so I just forward all of my mail to @me.com and can setup my replies to come from any of the accounts that are forwarded to my gmail account, but didn't one of our members claim to get push Gmail through the Google app on the AppStore?