Push!!!

I guess most of you are famililar with blackberries and the fact that they keep receiving emails constantly...
So well, I do not have a blackberry but I was curious on how it worked... I wondered, if it goes an check email every 1 minute that is hell a lot of data... so then I discover that in fact the emails are not "pulled" as they would be from your Outlook, Eudora or any desktop email client... the emails are pushed to the device from the server!!!

That made sense. That means that the data needed is just the negotiation and when you have an email to receive a part of it or all if you wanted. That's fair.

I started thinking how this could be done. I did not understand the principle. Do we need an extra layer in the server, after the IMAP or POP that pushes emails?
I knew that Microsoft Exchange included this push feature, but what about regular email servers like mine?

I started imagining how it "should" work. The mobile device should open a tunnel or connection to the email server. Does it mean that each device connected to GPRS has an IP? There are not enough IP's!!!

I found a couple of free solutions for my HTC Artemis (P3300) which is a WM6 machine, and I was very happy.

First it was emoze http://www.emoze.com

Emoze provides free push service. You dowonload a little software in the pda/phone (they support a lot of them) and then you can either use their servers to push gmail, yahoo or gmail apps directly to your device, or install a desktop application with your outlook to push (with your computer always on, sure) the email.

OK. I don't like to give away my passwords for email to a company but I tried. The problem is that norai is not gmail or yahoo, is just imap, so I had to forward all incoming email to an account I have in gmail and then pushed to my device. It worked, but that was not the way.

Then I found consillent, another free service to push email... but this time, IMAP!!
http://www.consilient.com

Well I tried it and I did not like it. I also have to give away my details... and it froze my HTC, I could not disconect it... not good.

Finally, I continued reading and I found out that IMAP-IDLE is push, and that my zimbra server has IMAP-IDLE, so this layer I though I needed was indeed there, in my zimbra email server!!

Now the only thing I required was to find a client for my Windows Mobile 6 machine that supported IMAP-IDLE:.

I found Flexmail 2007. You can try it for 15 days.

This was just I needed. Push email to my PDA... and just with the right software. It just works!!!

You have other software out there that support IMAP-IDLE like chattermail for your Palm OS.

If you have a IMAP-IDLE server providing your email, then you have push. Just google imap-idle client and your phone and you will find what you need.  

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