Direct Push no good? - Page 2

AJerman · #11 (**permalink**) 09-20-2007, 09:41 AM

Yeah, Direct Push is an Exchange only technology. Anything else, your ISP's email, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc, none of those use Direct Push regardless of whether the button works or not or if it's on or not. You can change how often your phone checks for messages on those other accounts in the account settings of the individual accounts.

So to answer your question, yes, my Direct Push button works fine, but I have a real Exchange server on my phone for work email. (Not that I ever enable it hehe)

SINNN · #12 (**permalink**) 09-20-2007, 09:58 AM

What is a Exchange Account anyways?. I thought it was a regular email account.

AJerman · #13 (**permalink**) 09-20-2007, 12:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SINNN

What is a Exchange Account anyways?. I thought it was a regular email account.

Exchange is a special mail server created by Microsoft that is more powerful and business oriented.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Exchange_Server

dishe · #14 (**permalink**) 09-20-2007, 01:10 PM

WHOA THERE!
Calm down people, I'm surprised this thread has gone on as long as it has already!!
A few people here have tried to point you guys in the right direction, but I feel like the rest of you still aren't really getting how this works.

Its very simple, and I'm only going to explain this once:

Email clients are inherently "pull" only, meaning you have to request a send/receive to check for new messages. Most desktop clients (outlook, thunderbird, netscape mail, etc) default to automatically check every 5 min or so for new messages. This is not LIVE email, but rather a short enough delay that no one minds. If you receive 2 emails within a minute of each other, you might not get them for another few min, when suddenly they will both appear as if you got them at the same time. Most people don't seem to mind or notice, but this is how it works.

"PUSH" is a new technology that give you a live email effect- messages come to you immediately instead of waiting to be requested first. This makes your email behave almost like an instant messaging application. In order for this to work, you need a constant connection open awaiting a signal for new messages. Blackberries were the first to offer such technology on a handheld device, and they work by keeping a very minimalist connection always on to a special blackberry server that is constantly polling your email, and it triggers a send/receive to your device whenever a new event is found. This is why in order for blackberrys to get live email, you have to pay for a special "blackberry internet plan". A regular internet plan would not include access to the blackberry server, and therefore would not have PUSH- your email would have to be regular pop3/imap which is only PULL technology.

Within the last 2 years, Microsoft started a similiar technology which they (uncreatively) dubbed "MS Push". Just like the blackberry server, you need a connection to a computer somewhere that will push your email to your device in real time. However, instead of needing a special plan or requesting access to one of their special machines, MS Push offers this capability to anyone who wants to run their own mail server. This is accomplished by running the latest versions of Exchange Server 2007.
The catch? Exchange Server is designed for companies and mail hosting services, and its not really designed (or priced) for the average consumer. The target market for this technology are cooperations that want to keep their professional businessmen always connected.

So, what do we do if we want live email (Push)?
You need to configure an exchange server for your mail. Once again, THIS WILL NOT WORK BY CONFIGURING JUST POP3 OR IMAP. Those technologies are just designed to pull.

If like most of us, you don't have access to Exchange Server and don't want to maintain your own mail hosting, luckily there are many services who will offer you hosting.
Some ISPs are beginning to offer personal Exchange Servers, and some mail hosting companies offer it as well. Around the forums here you'll find some popular free ones (mail2web, for example) with limited features, or for a couple of bucks get a full blown personal account.

Is Push email really worth all this effort?
That's up to you. Live email is cool to have, but its not as simple as POP3 or IMAP, plus having the constant connection to the server is a little bit of a battery drain.
The nice thing about Exchange Server, however, is that it offers more than just live email. It also does live activesyncing of all your data... contacts, calendar, notes, etc...
This way, you can actually add an appointment or contact to your exchange server, and it will immediately show up on your phone!
Or better yet, you don't have to worry about losing your information since if you break/hard reset your device, all you need to do is configure the Exchange Server info, and like magic all of your info is back!

I personally have a free account with mail2web, and I love it. I do occasionally turn off push to save battery and set it to only check every 15 minutes. Its nice to have it when I'm expecting a lot of emails.

There, I took the time to write this, I hope it helps someone.
Now go fix your devices, and lets get a mod to close this thread!

borealcool · #15 (**permalink**) 09-20-2007, 01:45 PM

That's an informative post dishe and I want to add a battery related footnote. By using nogprs and configuring all my POP3 accounts not to automatically check for emails, I have doubled my battery life. It's a huge sacrifice and ridiculous since it's the phone's most important feature, but the battery on this phone sucks so much that no auto email is better than a dead phone by noon.

I don't personally use Direct Push with an Exchange server, but if anyone can provide a battery consumption comparison vs POP3 automatic checking it would be appreciated.

**stroths** · #16 (**permalink**) 09-20-2007, 11:33 PM

I can't offer a comparison to pop3 with battery life. However, I run push via Exchange 2007 24x7 and my battery is still around 80-90% at the end of the day (depending on how many calls I take). Push mail generally uses less battery life than any pull method (ie pop3). That is unless you set your pull interval to a very long time.

borealcool · #17 (**permalink**) 09-21-2007, 08:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stroths

I can't offer a comparison to pop3 with battery life. However, I run push via Exchange 2007 24x7 and my battery is still around 80-90% at the end of the day (depending on how many calls I take). Push mail generally uses less battery life than any pull method (ie pop3). That is unless you set your pull interval to a very long time.

Amazing, guess I'll have to look into getting access to an Exchange account.