I'm guessing iOS doesn't support the 16 year old and widely supported IMAP IDLE extension that provides push notifications? Because GMail does:<p><pre><code> mike@laptop:~$ openssl s_client -quiet -connect imap.gmail.com:993 -crlf
depth=1 C = US, O = Google Inc, CN = Google Internet Authority
verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate
verify return:0
* OK Gimap ready for requests from 5.68.43.84 iz11if3450779wic.18
1 LOGIN ********@googlemail.com ******************
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UNSELECT IDLE NAMESPACE QUOTA ID XLIST CHILDREN X-GM-EXT-1 UIDPLUS COMPRESS=DEFLATE ENABLE MOVE CONDSTORE ESEARCH
1 OK ********@googlemail.com **** **** authenticated (Success)
2 EXAMINE INBOX
* FLAGS (\Answered \Flagged \Draft \Deleted \Seen $Forwarded $label1 $MDNSent JunkRecorded $NotJunk NonJunk $Junk Junk)
* OK [PERMANENTFLAGS ()] Flags permitted.
* OK [UIDVALIDITY 596417035] UIDs valid.
* 44 EXISTS
* 0 RECENT
* OK [UIDNEXT 548] Predicted next UID.
* OK [HIGHESTMODSEQ 25348]
2 OK [READ-ONLY] INBOX selected. (Success)
3 IDLE
+ idling
</code></pre>
I'm pretty sure every desktop IMAP client supports it too. And K-9 Mail on my Android phone does too.
Google could only provide push to iOS through Exchange, something they have to license from Microsoft. So, they're not doing that any more. As far as I can see, there actually aren't any license-free options available.<p>But you can use their Gmail app and still get push notifications.
I would be happy to switch from Mail.app to the Gmail iPhone app if someone at Google would (pretty please) implement an actual Mail.app alternative. I'm beyond certain that I'm not the only one here that has multiple Gmail-based email accounts. And they all get emails all the time.<p>The Gmail app may technically support multiple email accounts, but in reality, it doesn't. Without a unified inbox view, checking email is a chore and a real headache.<p>I also don't think this has much to do with Exchange licensing; the fact of the matter is, IMAP IDLE has existed for the better part of 16 years, and is the perfect push solution for email. Mail.app for the iPhone and OS X, along with countless other IMAP clients, (fully?) support IDLE - Gmail just needs to step up their game.
This makes me sad. The notifications that the Gmail app provides also show up for mails that are filtered outside the inbox. For example "junk" mails or social media notifications also show up even though they never reach my inbox but are filtered into labels. Another awesome point of the native notifications is that they disappear if you read the mail somewhere else, for example on your laptop. This helps prevent cluttering of the lock screen on iOS.
This is an old news. Google announced[1] that a while back.<p>[1] <a href="http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2716936" rel="nofollow">http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=27169...</a>
The logical way to implement these would be to have a single push channel in the mobile platform for all notifications. Messages send via this channel could then wake up an application on the mobile device to process the message and maybe perform some other actions. In order to save battery the incoming messages could be delayed a bit, grouped together and delivered in batch.<p>The push channel we already have on the platforms but I guess at least iOS and Windows Phone limit how it can be used for this kind of purposes.
To me the article treads frightfully close to conflating "push email" (being notified immediately when a message hits the inbox instead of polling at regular intervals) and "push notifications" (the medium of the actual notification). Thankfully it looks like the comment section here is able to tell them apart, but calling Exchange ActiveSync "push notifications" seems like either ignorance or pageview fishing.
Are there any alternative mail services that provide push notifications?<p>I've tried switching over to the Gmail app for a week and found it to be quite buggy. Badge counts would not be updated properly, emails would sometimes not load when you went into the detail view, etc. If it weren't for the clunkyness I wouldn't mind using it.
Does this affect Mailbox users? I've only started using mailbox but I love it so far, and it let's me combine 2 gmail accounts into one app (which I think you can't do in the iOS gmail app?).