Want push email on your iPhone? No problem
Well, kind of. How ’bout your email application checking every 5 minutes instead of the minimum 15 minutes? Want it faster? How about 2 minutes? That’s what we’ve been able to figure out with the help of Arminius2. In this simple step-by-step guide you’ll be on your way to fake push email heaven! That BlackBerry is looking worse and worse… Full instructions with pictures after the jump!
First, you’ll need ssh installed on your iPhone. We use Terminal, but this method will work for anyone using a SFTP client. You want to copy the com.apple.mobilemail.plist to your computer. Be aware that in order for this to work, you will have to have auto-fetch on already and not set on manual. The .plist is located in /var/root/Library/Preferences/
Once the .plist is copied to your computer, you’ll need to use a Property List Editor (.plist) to edit the file.
In the .plist you will see the "AutoFetchInterval" at the top. Simply double-click this value.
Then, just change the value to anything you want. It could be 10 minutes, 8 minutes, 1 minute — you get the idea!
Then all you have to do is replace the existing file on the iPhone with your edited .plist. That’s it! You’re so hip you can feel it!
Quick note: this will remain active on your iPhone and you should experience no issues but, there is a but. If you go into Settings/Mail on the iPhone, it will reset the .plist and your changes will be lost. You can feel free to go into Settings and change anything else, just don’t go into the Mail section or this will be undone. That’s it! Let us know how it works for you. We got ours set to 2 minutes and don’t notice a big drop in battery life, if any!
OMFG this is the best tip in a long time THANKS BG I CANT WAIT TO GET HOME OMFG IM SO EXCITED OMFG!!!!
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Fake push email is going to kill you battery. Call me I’ll loan you a blackberry while your jesus phone is in the shop getting its guts replaced. Actually, I think you should change your phone to look for new email every minute. This way you will make new friends at your ISP and you will get about a half day out of your battery! Hope you dont travel overseas!
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ejay, Calm down.
And yeah this is making the BB look a bit worse.
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So the jesus phone is centered around make-shift work-arounds? Ill stick to the real miracle - my Blackberry Curve, thank you.
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yeah ejay keep control.
actually I’m impressed by the battery. I get almost the same life as my 8800 and thats using alot more media.
the drain with checking every minute would depend on what your connected to, if on wifi I dont think it would do very much, on EDGE i think it takes much longer so I would expect that to drain more.
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This will really not hurt your battery all that much…
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umm actually I was being sarcastic as I want REAL push email on my iPhone not a workaround. Even though like test said in another post. My email isnt time sensitive so it really shouldnt matter…
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Completely aside from the point, is that the world exclusive first pic of the iphone nano? BG, your sources are amazing.
/kidding
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Changing the settings from checking the email from 15 minutes to every 2 minutes won’t hurt the battery much? Well it won’t, unless you never receive any emails, but If you constantly get emails, and your phone has to pull them, your battery will be crushed.
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This is a great way to put major strain or crash mail servers.There is a reason pop settings usually don’t allow less than 15 minute intervals.
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haha Radio, truly.
Real PUSH > pseudo PUSH
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actually my BIS takes 15min with Blackberry. Yahoo and Gmail are true push but those are not my main accounts. So if you have BES then yes Real push > pseudo Push but if your in my shoes then at its best its the same, with this its better.
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I am with you Radio
Bootleg Push email doesn’t sound good to me!!!
I’ll stick to my BB Curve.
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Well the good thing about all the attention the iPhone is getting, is that you have all these people trying to develop apps and work arounds for it. And they do a great job at it.
This will indeed help those that want more reliable email; it can be an option to activate in a situation in which for example you REALLY can not afford missing an e-mail.
No point comparing Push email between BB and iPhone, the BB is specifically made for that, if you bought an iPhone for push e-mail you are a retard.
The iPhone doesn’t target suits or 200 email a day users….but maybe this kind of workaround will get Jessica Simpson or Paris Hilton to use an iPhone.
IMHO, Nokia E90 and HTC Kaiser all the way with push email via exchange server
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It just doesn’t seem worth it to me.
According to engadgetmobile “Apple updates will break third party software.
http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2007/09/12/apple-backtracks-updates-will-most-likely-break-3rd-party-iph/
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If you change the permissions on the plist to read only for everyone i believe it does not get overwritten, although the settings view does not reflect the number changed.
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When is M$ direct push going to come to the iPhone.
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Just get an ipod touch and a blackberry. Problems solved.
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Hmm. Just a workaround. Not the real deal. Sorry, I’m sticking with my BB Pearl and switch to BB Pearl 2 when it arrives.
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This isn’t the same as the ‘fake push’ implementation by SE and others. For instance, the SE will just leave a connection open to the IMAP server using IDLE. This doesn’t really affect battery life (or hasn’t for me), but also doesn’t have the phone constantly polling the mail server when there’s no mail available.
The only thing better than the way the SE does it, is a Blackberry, which has its own method that works very very well.
Unfortunate for the Blackberry - Great communicator, pretty lackluster phone.
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Um,I don’t have an iPhone, but didn’t Steve Jobs say at the keynote that it would have push email from Yahoo… “Just like a Blackberry” to quote him directly. What happened to that?
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I believe that ‘just like a blackberry’ feature of Yahoo works, but only for Yahoo. Most of us would rather not be using Yahoo for our mail needs.
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I think BG needs a dictionary… lookup “PUSH”, then lookup “PULL”. And yes, the act of checking DOES drain battery. Perhaps BG needs a physics lesson too.
If you need an e-mail device, iPhone certainly isn’t it. There is no comparison between iPhone and any other blackberry, win mobile, or treo when it comes to email. Maybe RIM should write a hack app for iPhone that does real push
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That BlackBerry is looking worse and worse…
I think this is a great site, but its getting very bias. No matter how much you may love your IPhone, the constant IPhone love that comes through nearly every post is getting tiring….
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Yup, I’m with blah.
If it were pulled literally every second, then you can go ahead and call it push, fine.
There’s no such thing as “fake push”, it’s either push, or it’s pull, quite simple really.
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