Why oh why not use IMAP IDLE?

[schettj]

I know several of you out there use "push email" - but before microsoft (re) invented that wheel, IMAP already *had* a perfectly good notification system in place for new email. In fact, it's pretty much exactly what MS "invented" for their own email.

Of course, MS doesn't support the IMAP IDLE command for IMAP clients. I have googled around for any third party apps that do support it - this is the best I have found:

http://www.geardiary.com/2007/01/15/...indows-mobile/
http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/ind...&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

So fine, we have one commercial email client that supports it, and one badly supported commercial "plug in" of sorts that works with the native email client.

Looks like I may take a shot at writing a .net app to log into an IMAP account, do the IDLE mojo, and then kick the built in email client to fetch mail when new mail arrives.

The ssl socket stuff seems simple enough, and the IMAP IDLE protocol is dead simple (you can do it by hand using telnet, for heavens sake!) so it's just a matter of figuring out the API to kick the email client into checking email... (looks like this would do the trick: http://groups.google.com/group/micro...bca474d3275680)


Anyone interested in that? Or anyone have a solution I missed?

** Found this ($60! Are they NUTS?) email client that seems to support IMAP IDLE: http://www.pocketgear.com/software_detail.asp?id=21448

** Found this freeware QMail:

http://www.modernnomads.info/wiki/in...figuring+QMail

Supposed to support IDLE, will have to check that out before spending time on this...