[answerman]

Haven't seen this addressed in a while, so I thought I'd toss it out again.

Has anyone come up with an IMAP IDLE solution that actually works? The only two I have found are vgsmail (never came out of beta, and only works with one account) and FlexMail (which is unreliable and doesn't integrate well with the OS).

This would be a huge benefit for the Apache, since more and more professional email providers (myself included) have IDLE support on the server end and it should in theory radically improve battery life, since the Apache would wait for the server to tell it that new mail has arrived rather than having to go through the whole "Check for new messages every x minutes" thing.

For the uninitiated... the way IDLE works is that the server "pushes" the mail to the device, instead of the device having to check for mail. Kind of like the way a BlackBerry works... and somewhat like the Microsoft Direct Push setup, except that it doesn't use Outlook or Exchange (works with any provider that offers IMAP connectivity with IDLE support).

I've been using IDLE on Mozilla Thunderbird on my PC for several months and it is fantastic... I never have to check for new mail. It just arrives by itself as soon as the server receives it.