What is the difference between PUSH and FETCH

Question

Level 1

6 points

What is the difference between PUSH and FETCH

I am a little confused. I use my iphone for both my personal POP email accounts and my business exchange account. I am trying to save as much battery as I can so I turned off push and set everything to manual...but now when I try and get may mail....it either says "connecting" or "checking for new mail" at the bottom of the screen and nothing happens from there.

What is the best way to setup this situation for the most battery life? I don't need it to automatically download emails just when I open the email accout would be nice.
I also noticed that when I delete an email from my iphone on my exchange account, it also deletes is on my desktop at work...I need to turn this off...is it possible?

IBM, Windows XP Pro

Posted on Aug 6, 2008 11:23 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

Damon M.

Level 4

3,705 points

Aug 6, 2008 1:05 PM in response to maxum25

Hi maxum25,

The difference between push and fetch is that:

When using push, the server sends a signal to the iphone and lets it know that an email is coming its direction. Kind of like receiving a call. The iphone does not need to do anything except receive the email.

When using fetch, the iphone has to wake up every so often and send a request to the server to see if there is any new email waiting for it on the server to download. This takes more time because the iphone sends a request, the server says yes there is some, the iphone says ok give me the new email.

Now the exchange email uses active sync to keep all changes on the exchange server and mobile device in sync. This is automatic and is the nature of exchange and active sync. In order to keep this from happening you would need to talk to your IT dept. and see if they have an imap or pop alternative. Even using imap reflects the changes back to the server.

Hope this helps.

Reply