There are many situations in which you might find it important to be up to date with your mailings – especially as soon as they hit your mailbox. This function is available with some mobile phones and commonly sold as ‘Blackberry functionality’ or push mail. In other words it is a more or less permanent connection between the mail server and the mobile phone which is now used by the mail server for pushing the messages across as soon as they arrive.
Usually this feature is only available with Microsoft Exchange boxes using the ActiveSync protocol which is even talked by some Nokia phones – they just call it ‘Mail for Exchange’.
As I am running Linux, you surely won’t find a Microsoft server in my near range. But that doesn’t say that we can’t do such fancy stuff – we just do it in a different way: A group of developers ported the Active Sync stuff to PHP and named it z-push.
As the site itself looks promising, I decided to give it a try. After 5 Minutes the whole setup was done and working. Simple and effective.
Patrick says:
I don’t know about Active Sync, but I know there is the IMAP ‘IDLE’ feature, which is available on any decent IMAP server (for example dovecot :) ).
Toei Rei says:
ActiveSync is a Microsoft thing. Fact is, the mobile phones usually have poor IMAP Support – that’s why they’re using something different. But I am sure, that z-push uses the IDLE command to stay online itself.
Yitu says:
Und nun nutzt Du Dein Handy zum Email-Lesen? ;)
Stargazer says:
Mitunter kann es durchaus vorkommen. Ich lasse mir gerne Systemmeldungen von meinen Servern auf das Gerät schicken…