An Alternative to Push Email

[markholl]

Unless you have a BlackBerry or are using an Exchange email, you probably don't have true "push" email. A lot of devices offer scheduled mail requests, especially for personal email like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo. The problem with that is to simulate push email, your device would need to be set to check for messages every 5 minutes. That can be a big drain on your battery. As most of us already know, battery life is precious on these multi-tasking mobile devices of ours.

For my person email, I use Yahoo. It is a pretty old account, long before the days of the now popular Gmail. Yahoo has a nice (free) service called Yahoo Alerts (http://alerts.yahoo.com/). You can choose from a wide variety of topics like News, Stocks, Sports, Weather and more. The alert will be sent to your email or mobile device (via sms text message) or both.

One of the Yahoo Alerts that can be set up is called Mail. This feature will send you a sms text message to your mobile phone every time you receive an email in your Yahoo Mail account. The beautiful thing is that an sms message is a true push communication so there is no drain on your battery life and you can be "alerted" instantly when you have a new email message. I have been using this service for a while and I love it.

You will also need to set up a filter in your Yahoo Mail settings. To ensure that all new email messages would be sent to me, here is the filter I created.

TEXT ALERT

If...To/CC contains "@" Then...Move message to Inbox folder and forward message to my wireless device

Beware, that if you get a lot of emails and you don't have an unlimited sms message plan with your carrier, the costs could add up fast.

[adamz]

Cool.
T-Mobile USA has a similar text-messaging email alert option. The filtering feature is the best since you can make it only push emails from people you care about. I imagine the Yahoo filtering can allow you to do the same thing.

Windows Live on Windows Mobile 6+ supports push email for Hotmail/Live accounts by the way. It's not a 5 minute thing.

Also, the Blackberry is only push if you have a connection to BES. Using BIS, emails are only checked every 15 minutes or every 2 minutes if messages have been received.

[Pony99CA]

Originally Posted by markholl

The beautiful thing is that an sms message is a true push communication so there is no drain on your battery life[....]

I don't believe that's true.

First, and most obviously, receiving an SMS message turns your display on, even if you ignore the message. That's a drain on battery life.

Second, I suspect that incoming calls (including SMS and MMS) use more battery life than sitting idle. That's why stand-by time is so much longer than talk time.

Finally, I don't believe that push is always more efficient than pull; it probably depends on your usage patterns. If you only get one or two E-mails per hour, push is probably more efficient than checking for E-mail every 15 minutes. However, if you get an E-mail every minute or so, push will probably turn your phone to high-power mode more frequently than if you pulled every 5 minutes, causing more battery drain. (It's possible that there's some tuning done to minimize this effect, but I suspect there will always be some cases where pulling saves battery life.)

Of course, if you need to have instantaneous E-mail notifications, there's not much you can do.

Steve