IMAP-IDLE plugin for Apple Mail
February 25, 2007
Yup I switched to Apple Mail from Thunderbird a few months back, primary reason being back then I was barely able to run my developer applications on 512MB of RAM (Apple Mail runs lighter than Thunderbird, unfortunately). It’s comforting to find that there is an IMAP-IDLE plugin for Apple Mail (Thunderbird got its IDLE support way back in 2004.)
What’s IDLE? Well, quoting myself:
Simply put, IDLE is a command that allows IMAP email servers to transmit updates to the client in real time. This saves the client from having to continuously poll the server to achieve the effect of new mail appearing immediately. All in all, an exceptionally useful command that saves Thunderbird the work of polling IMAP servers continuously.
So anyway, it’s really simple to install and use (just simple checkboxes for enabling IDLE for your IMAP accounts).
Remember to configure Mail to stop polling these mail accounts every X minutes or so now. Enjoy the geeky feeling of knowing you’ve just saved several CPU cycles and a few kilobytes of bandwidth.
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Thanks. Didn’t know about IMAP-IDLE before reading this. Googling it seems to return lot of results about iPhone using IDLE with Yahoo! Mail for push mail. AFAIK, the way it seems to work is to keep a TCP connection to the IMAP server alive and listen on that port for updates from the server.
I really don’t have a problem with IMAP polling every 1 minute or so in terms of bandwidth or CPU cycles. The actual annoying part is when Outlook brings up a pop-up window complaining that it couldn’t make the connection because of some network error (and then it freezes and I have to stop it and re-launch it). Switching to IDLE wouldn’t really fix this problem (I think!) because Outlook might still complain that it lost this TCP connection.
Posted by: Harish Mallipeddi on February 26, 2007 12pm