MBOX-Line: From tss at iki.fi  Fri Mar 23 17:48:38 2012
To: imap-protocol@u.washington.edu
From: Timo Sirainen <tss@iki.fi>
Date: Fri Jun  8 12:34:48 2018
Subject: [Imap-protocol] IDLE + inbox file
In-Reply-To: <A9124E0E-76A1-4853-AEC6-2F7D519754B7@mac.com>
References: <11E08CAD-B343-4845-9C33-1DA80AFD652E@psu.edu>
	<1234979693.29240.1770.camel@timo-desktop>
	<alpine.OSX.2.00.0902181017110.34559@hsinghsing.panda.com>
	<1234981810.29240.1785.camel@timo-desktop>
	<53E653CF-EDA4-4B4B-8B1E-E1EAF6C29B36@imap.cc>
	<alpine.OSX.2.00.0902181047070.34559@hsinghsing.panda.com>
	<A9124E0E-76A1-4853-AEC6-2F7D519754B7@mac.com>
Message-ID: <F88F7C11-F69D-4A7D-9376-D050D4B0F97B@iki.fi>

On 23.3.2012, at 22.36, PA wrote:

> On Feb 18, 2009, at 10:48 AM, Mark Crispin wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 18 Feb 2009, David Rauschenbach wrote:
>>> In a similar vein, our mobile gateway issues a fake EXISTS at around the 
>>> 2-minute mark, to keep the mobile operator networks from timing out the TCP 
>>> session.
>> 
>> UW and Panda issue an untagged OK at the two minute point for the same 
>> reason.
>> 
>> All of which renders IDLE pretty much pointless compared to polling.
> 
> Is that still the current state of affair, 3 years on? IDLE being rather pointless compared to just plain polling? Or?

It depends on your purpose:

a) If the only thing you care about is immediate notifications of new emails and other changes, then IDLE works fine

b) If you care about power usage, then IDLE isn't much better from polling, because in either case the device needs to wake up every n minutes to do some work and send some data


