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iCloud mail push notification

push notification only seems to work (off and on tbh) only when mail is running in the background. As soon as mail is shut down, nothing happens 🙂 bug ?

iPod touch 4G, iOS 4, W7/64 ult. (main system)

Posted on Oct 13, 2011 3:52 PM

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36 replies

Oct 14, 2011 3:12 AM in response to arrow7

the question is whether yes or no iCloud mail is purely IMAP. It's supposed to be accessible thru IMAP in third party clients and well, so far I haven't seen it work at all - wlm, thunderbird - (I started another thread about this) but it seems that it uses its own protocol to get mails on iOS. If it was just IMAP the answer would be clear, Apple mail on iOS doesn't support "IDLE" so just like Gmail/IMAP (at the opposite of GSync), there would be no way to get mails in real time, just fetching works for IMAP on iOS. But again I don't think that iCloud runs on IMAP mode on iOS, and push seems to work when the mail app runs, when obviously it should work as well when it doesn't run.


... and I'm confirming , I just tried again and push on iCloud mail works when "mail" runs in the background and device is locked.

Oct 14, 2011 6:15 AM in response to arrow7

I'm not sure what you mean by "as soon as Mail is shut down". I have Push on for the phone because of certain apps that use push for notifications, and I believe it was needed originally for Find My iPhone, don't know if that's still the case. However I have Mail for 2 iCloud accounts set to only check manually and fetch set to manually but no matter what setting I use all my email messages instantly get pushed to the phone and pop up the notification. I really don't want or need to have my emails pushed, I only want to check for them manually. I had also used MobileMe and had the same issue. I don't think Mail on the phone can be "shut down" if you double click the Home button to get to the recently used apps bar and tap the minus sign there on Mail it immediately does a mail check. So it's never shut down, at least on my iPhone 4.

Oct 14, 2011 6:19 AM in response to arrow7

do the following test:


(1) close all apps in the background

(2) restart your iOS 5 device

(3) send an e-mail from another client

(4) waiting for push mail

--> it should work at this time (there is no mail.app in the background)


(5) now open the mail.app on your iOS 5 device, and send it to the background

(6) send an e-mail from another client again

(7) waiting for push mail

--> it works (with the mail.app in the background)


(8) now close the mail.app completely (kill the app from running in the background)

(9) send an e-mail from another client again

(7) waiting for push mail

--> it doesn't work


It seems to me, that killing the mail.app from the background in iOS 5 the process which receives the pushed e-mails is also killed.

Oct 14, 2011 7:22 AM in response to arrow7

I think so as well. At night when I charge my iPhone, I usually double-tap the home button and close out the apps running in the background....all of them. Two nights in a row. NONE of my emails were pushed to my iPhone 4. As soon as I opened up the mail app, I got 11 emails. The mail app has been open since this morning and now I'm getting mail pushed to my iPhone. Something is definitely wrong here.

Oct 14, 2011 7:23 AM in response to spirou781

@spirou 781 yeah I didn't test what happens when rebooting the device but for the rest that's exactly what I got here. As to your scenario, the mail app becoming unreachable by APNS once shut down from iOS, not sure about that as push keeps working perfectly here with Windows Live mail addresses. The issue is specifically with iCloud. So it would be the iCloud signal to APNS that doesn't happen ... in some conditions... mail app not detected when shut down manually... but only for iCloud ... weird...something wrong with the protocol may be ...

Oct 14, 2011 7:45 AM in response to arrow7

lol okay my test didn't mean anything as I'm noticing that I have no wifi at all after rebooting... until I unlock the device and set my network to the right router again. Happens after each reboot (the device switches to a nearby hotspot). And you're right, as soon as wifi runs again, mail app still closed (not running at all), I get a push for mails on my iCloud account.

Oct 14, 2011 10:39 AM in response to arrow7

Push notifications have been VERY patchy since the transition from MobileMe to iCloud.


Personally, and rather obviously, I'm rather disappointed as I was happy to pay for good service under MobileMe and now its free it seems to be rather poor service.


That said, we should do well to remember the disasterous MobileMe launch in 2008, so hopefully Apple will sort this out quickly.

Oct 14, 2011 10:49 AM in response to stupidfish

I'm having the opposite problem every email is being pushed to my phone setting the alerts off. I don't want this. Does anyone know how to stop emails from being pushed without turning Push off altogether? I have it on for other applications that use it for their notifications. I've played with the manual settings both on Fetch as well as just manual but nothing works evrything keeps being pushed with the alerts going off all day.

Oct 15, 2011 1:49 PM in response to spirou781

Hi,

I'm a .Mac (err MobileMe) user that has upgraded to iCloud and i've strangley noticed the lacking pushed emails also.


Ok, I've double-tapped and force quit the iPhone mail app.... then sent myself some emails from the Mac and hey presto - push works again! Very odd....


Next, I locked the iPhone and went back to the Mac to send some more test emails (while the iPhone app is just put into the background and not quitted). Yup, you guessed it - no push notifications!


Looks like this is some bug to do with the iPhone's mail app ???


I don't really wanna force-quit the iPhone mail app just to be alerted about new emails! lol... come on Apple, please fix this :-)


Cheers,

Steve

iCloud mail push notification

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