IMAP in the iPhone

Will Sheward - 07:04am Jan 17, 2007 PST
Guest User

"In particular, Apple has partnered with Yahoo to provide free "push"
IMAP email to all iPhone customers. Push email was one of the reasons
that Research in Motion's Blackberry devices gained such quick
acceptance: the instant you receive mail at a server, that server in
turn pushes the message to your device, much as receiving voicemail
causes an almost immediate notification on a phone. You can also pull
messages through normal POP and IMAP."

Evidently its a little more comprehensive than that. It looks like the
iPhone's email client supports a pretty comprehensive set of IMAP
features, including IMAP-IDLE. IDLE is an existing IMAP standard that
was recently included by the IETF in their 'LEMONADE' profile
(extensions to IMAP and SMTP to make them more suited to email on mobile
devices - you can find out more at www.lemonadeformobiles.com). It
provides a 'push' user experience to anyone with an IMAP mail account
with a provider whose mailserver supports IDLE.

So whilst the iPhone comes with 'free' Yahoo Push email, that same push
email experience is available to a wide range of existing IMAP mail
accounts.

It'll be interesting to see if the iPhone eventually supports other
LEMONADE standards (like forward without download), it'd make sense as
this is the easiest way of replicating that BlackBerry feel using Open
Standards.

Will.

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Will Sheward
VP Marketing - Isode

Tel: +44 (0)20 8783 2973
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