Palm Pre Gmail and IMAP: Pushes with IMAP IDLE 27
We've just confirmed via an anonymous tipster with an emulator that the Palm Pre does, in fact, fully support IMAP IDLE on Gmail. What on earth does that mean? It means that if you're using Gmail, your email gets pushed out to your Pre nearly instantly. So says our tipster:
It actually comes in faster than my blackberry.
This, friends, is stupendous news. We strongly suspect that any IMAP email account with IDLE support will push to the Palm Pre.
The backstory, for those that are curious, is that IMAP IDLE is a sort of push system that isn't nearly as robust as either BlackBerry's system or Exchange Active Sync, but gets the job done. Longtime Treo faithful will fondly recall (and currently fondly use) ChatterEmail, a PalmOS email client that does a great job supporting IMAP IDLE push. The developer of ChatterEmail worked at Palm for a time and, as we dearly hoped, he apparently spent his time there teaching Palm how to properly implement IMAP IDLE for push.
Thanks Anonymous Tipster!



















27 Comments
Holy CRAP, that's HUGE
That's what she said.
That joke never gets old. Love it
It's officially old.
Will this be available with AOL or other services?
Do like I did, set up a gmail account. you can have all ur emails (aol, yahoo, etc) go to your gmail account. I actually prefer it now I have seven different email accounts and now I only need to log into one, & it is very effective.
I've even added the contacts & calendar events from my Centro that I want on the Pre. You have almost nine days to get organized don't wait till June 6th.
If you're gonna go through all that trouble, you might as well just set up a free exchange account and then have real push email.
How do you go about setting up a free exchange account?
Kewl!
I really hope it'll work with any IMAP email account!
Eat that, iPhone! Freaking 2 years, and their PARTNER for Maps and email won't push. Ridiculous.
Wow, this is awesome news! I've been wondering about this for some time now. This platform is going to be epic. I cannot wait for Palm to hit their stride with webOS. I just pray they don't drop the ball like they did with the palm OS
Oh man this is fantastic news. This will help with battery life big time, since both of my email accounts (one Gmail, one private domain) are IDLE-friendly.
How will that help battery life?
As I understand the protocol, it simply keeps the connection open and waits for a signal from the server when a message arrives, instead of going out every X minutes to check.
Mind you, if you get at least two or greater messages more often than the X minutes you'd normally check, it's going to use more power.
What about yahoo email? Is that push?
Yeah what about yahoo mail? YAAAAHOO!
where is my ski mask?
Hopefully this reduces battery consumption.... that is the whole grand benefit with PUSH. BES and Exchange push without dramatically reducing battery life.... IMAP Idle (at least in Chatter) sucked the battery life right out of the device. For me.... it used 50% less battery to sync every 15 minutes then to rely on IMAP Idle.
I've always gotten good battery life with Chatteremail. Better than scheduled syncing too. There is no reason now holding me back from a Pre....except my cheapness and desire to wait until sprint says I can keep my current advantage club account and plan.
But maybe they're using their server for imap idle, so it won't suck battery.
If the Pre supports Exchange ActiveSync and Gmail supports EAS, why should I be excited about IMAP Idle on Gmail?
Because i believe that google eas only works with contacts and calendars not email. So this is very good news.
Does the phone look hotter in her hand or is it just me? Premium Linux hosting account with DDos Protection designed for small and medium websites.
Anyone can help me with setting up the addtional email accounts to go into the gmail account...i.e..push. I'm not sure how to do this. Thank you
My gmail sync is just churning, no new messages. removed and re installed still nothing, just keeps refreshing, but no messages appear? Any ideas?
I actually prefer it now I have seven different email accounts and now I only need to log into one, & it is very effective.
earn money
Just set up Gmail to accompany my work Exchange email account/service with EAS. In the WebOS email setup, I selected "Add new account", typed in my gmail account login in and then selected "update". Gmail started sync'ing and the setup was complete. What a snap! It works great! What did I do wrong?