So i was starting my search for a provider that would give me this stuff for my new iPhone (which i love) . I brought up the ususal suspect with the search terms “iphone push gmail” which seemed obvious to me. Well, after some browsing through the results i came up with quite some providers (Synchronica, Cortado, emoze) that told to support what i needed. After testing Synchronica i figured out that it synced only my new mails on my device but not vice-versa, nor did emoze. As i was already frustrated and Cortado didn’t even support GMail sync i stopped my tries.

Today, however i was taking the underground to work and started to think about this problem. When i came to the office i digged a bit more into the problem. I was thinking about splitting up the problem in two parts.

So i was first trying to find out if push-mail would be a possibility for the iPhone anyhow. As always, Apple maintains a low profile when talking about the tech specs of the iPhone. So i couldn’t really figure out if the iPhone supports any of the current push-mail standards except a lonely forum report stating that it supports IMAP IDLE. If this is the truth it would be at least possible to sync an IMAP IDLE capable mailbox (which GMail isn’t). Yet i wonder why Apple doesn’t seem to mention this in it’s press releases.

The second problem is more a Google Mail problem, than a iPhone as Google didn’t even include IMAP support to GMail till now. So also no possiblity for IMAP IDLE here. I was thinking about alternatives here and came up with something like “Hey Google has APIs for everything“. Well, after a short look i figured out that they left GMail way behind. There is only a small RSS feed ability – nothing more. That means to me, there is no reliable way to tell Google Mail for example, that a mail is read, etc. Sure, you can hack something that does this via CURL, etc. But that’s not what i want to, i don’t want to change my implementation every time GMail get’s a new fancy look (which indeed didn’t happen quite often, yet ).

Finally i found some quite complicated construction to bring some sort of IMAP support to GMail. As i don’t think this is a passable way for the broader audience (including me) i didn’t give it a try. If you have and can report how it works i would however appreciate it.

My plans for this, if i found a way to sync to GMail – are, to implement a solution that does what i want via Apache James.

Why i write all this? Dunno. Well, i do. I wanted to bring the background stuff i already figured out to some bigger audience which maybe enables us to find a solution for that. So, your comments are more than welcome.

Update: As announced earlier this day, Google introduces IMAP for GMail. Problem solved, i’d say.