Take advantage of push email servers in Mail.app

Aug 25, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: pamon

This should be manifestly obvious (and that's probably why I couldn't find any documentation for it). But then again, you'd think they would put it in, for instance, Gmail's IMAP setup help page, but it's not...

I am sure we all have heard about Push in Apple's Mail by now. For those folks who use email to the point of obsession (I'm afraid I do), this is a great way to keep your mailboxes up-to-the-second current without having Mail.app hog the bandwidth, checking every minute or five minutes. If your server supports IDLE (Gmail, .Mac/MobileMe, and most university servers do), then the only things you need to do are:

  1. Go into Mail » Preferences » Accounts (Advanced) and make sure that Use IDLE command if the server supports it is enabled (it's enabled by default).
  2. (This is the fun part) Again go into Mail » Preferences » General and set Check for new Mail to Manually.
Now send yourself a new message (preferably from a different account) and watch the fun.

[robg adds: If you have a mix of accounts some of which include IDLE support and some which don't (as I do), here's another way to set this up. For the IDLE-enabled accounts, uncheck the box next to 'Include when automatically checking for new mail' on the Advanced tab of that account's settings pages. For the non-IDLE accounts, leave this box checked.

Then, in General in Mail's Preferences, leave the 'Check for new mail' pop-up set to whatever time interval you prefer. This way, your IDLE-enabled email will show up as soon as the server pushes it to your machine, but you'll still check the non-IDLE accounts on a regular basis. This works quite well for me -- three of my accounts have IDLE enabled and the email just shows up, while the other two accounts are checked using Mail's automatic checks.]

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