deadstick -- my apologies -- I should have been more clear with my multiple posts. It's working pretty good, except for these observations:

1. does not seem to work if the phone has been asleep for some time, I'm guessing here, but probably 45+ minutes

2. it drained my battery quite severely -- between 9am and 4pm, it went from 100% to 20% -- and the phone was very warm around 3pm -- I think from continuous wifi connectivity? There are many wifi hotspots in my office building; the phone doesn't connect to these hotspots but the battery drainage stopped and the heat dissipated as soon as turned the wifi off ie. it's 6:30pm and i'm still at 20% power

3. required two reboots to get the app working

This app is awesome -- when it works, the notification is pretty much INSTANT! I wonder if some of the issues are related to the 1.0.2 firmware. I'm probably going to revirginize and upgrade to 1.1.1 this weekend (wish me luck).

My setup:

Firmware: 1.0.2
Email: fastmail.fm

If have another suggestion:

Do you know the app "Taskbar Notifier" ? It shows a little symbol on the upper right corner on the screen if you have unread sms/mail. Since we don't see if the Imap-Idle daemon is active in the background (e.g. after a reboot), wouldn't it be nice to display a little icon to show that the daemon is active and connected?

I am afraid the app doesn't work for me at all. I am using GMail IMAP, and nothing pops up - could this be due to SSL? And can you work around that?

Otherwise - great idea and keep up the work!

In fact - it's almost definitely something to do with SSL - I tried it with my AOL email (as opposed to GMail) and it works fine...

Is it possible to incorporate SSL? I'd be very grateful!

As I indicated in an earlier post in this thread, this application will not work with Gmail because Gmail does not support the IMAP Idle command. You need to use a different mail provider to take advantage of this feature. Fastmail.fm is the most commonly used Idle service.

that's not correct. Gmail does support IMAP idle. I have tried it on Sony Ericsson phones and it pushes email out to the phone on arrival not simply on periodical polling. I suspect any problems are to do with ports or more likely SSL authentication.

Sorry Hal. Just did some checking and it looks like gmail did indeed start implementing IDLE -- it just wasn't right away and that's what confused me. From what I was able to find out, they began adding IDLE to user accounts a few days after completing the upgrade to IMAP (sometime during the course of last week).

That's certainly good news and lends credence to my theory that Google's addition of IMAP (and now Idle) is in preparation of the launch of the Google Mobile OS. I'm sure unlike Apple and their stupid Yahoo! quasi-push system, Google will be smart enough to offer real push mail using industry-wide protocols.

gmail + IMAP = IDLE?

Wow. What a fantastic week it's been. With deadstick's imap app, and now gmail supporting idle as well. I concur with the others though -- the app doesn't work with gmail's idle, probably since it requires SSL/port 993 for incoming mail (hint hint, deadstick! hehe):

https://mail.google.com/support/bin/...y?answer=77702
(iPhone specific)

Incoming Settings
Use SSL: ON
Authentication: password
Server Port: 993


http://mail.google.com/support/bin/a...y?answer=78799
(Configuring other mail clients)

Incoming Mail (IMAP) Server - requires SSL: imap.gmail.com
Use SSL: Yes
Port: 993

I agree - IMAP gmail would be far better implemented than Y!'s rubbish system. This is what we need on iPhone.

Deadstick:

Generally, the application is working great. One problem and one suggestion, however. First, I notice that sometimes I will open up your application and find that it somehow has become deactivated. This typically occurs after I have had the application open for several hours at a time.

Second, would it be possible to have your application play a notification tone even if the user has turned off the general mail.app tone in settings? Otherwise, we get two successive tones per message -- one when your app notifies the user of a new message via IDLE, and then a second tone when/if we tell the application to go ahead and get the message. As best as I can tell, turning the mail.app tone off also silences the tone for your app. Of course, this problem will be rendered moot when (and I have confidence in you!) behind the scenes triggering of mail.app is accomplished.

David