Thursday, October 23, 2008

Working on IMAP IDLE support for Android's Email app

For all those screaming about the lack of push e-mail updates for regular IMAP accounts with the basic Email app in Android, I have been digging into the code for the past few days and am preparing a patch for IMAP IDLE support. For those that do not know, IMAP IDLE allows a client to maintain a persistent, light connection to the server that is then notified of new messages as they arrive. Many IMAP servers support this extension, including Microsoft Exchange which would thus allow push e-mail for those that need corporate e-mail options on the G1.

I will post an APK for folks to try once I have the support working well. Stay tuned...

9 comments:

Unknown said...

This would be really sweet. I noticed that IMAP idle doesn't work. Than you for working on a patch.

Ben Grimm said...

k9mail is a fork of android mail that provides some usability enhancements. Please consider adding the IDLE support to that project: http://code.google.com/p/k9mail/

Unknown said...

I'm planning to submit my patches upstream to the Android open source project, however this K-9 Mail app might be a good place to go while we wait for platform releases with my improvements. Thanks for the heads up.

Unknown said...

Uhh yeah, this would be verry nice... There is an option, which says Email check frequency... Does this have to be at "never" then? Please document this when you release it, so the user knows how to configure this push E-Mail...

Unknown said...

any update on this? would love to use this once it is done. Thanks.

Anonymous said...
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Unknown said...

I would also be interested in this I have both the Default Client and K9 on my HTC Magic and neither work with my IMAP Server. They both know a new message has arrived but are unable to display the content. I work for an Email Server software vendor whose employees were heavily involved with the development of the LEMONADE mobile email standard (of which IMAP-IDLE) is a component and we would happily provide a testing license for our server.

whitemice said...

Status? Just picked up an Android 2.0 phone (Motorola Droid). Very nice phone - but no evidence of IMAP PUSH support. If I google "Android IMAP PUSH" this is pretty much the only technical article I find.

Unknown said...

Sadly, I never finished this work. I changed jobs and no longer needed IMAP IDLE for work e-mail support. I do believe that K-9 mail eventually implemented this same support however.