Msgpush.com is a new web service that takes advantage of the iPhone 3.0 software to offer instant alerts on the iPhone when email arrives in your inbox.

When the iPhone was first released, there was a lot of hype about it offering true push email on the go for users. Everyone hoped that this would be provided through the IMAP IDLE extension, which would have made the feature available to all IMAP email services that support IMAP IDLE.

In fact, it turned out that this service was available first of all only to Yahoo.com mail users, and then later in the iPhone 2.0 software to Exchange users, and it doesn’t use IMAP IDLE.

The best my iPhone can do is poll my IMAP accounts through its “Fetch” feature every fifteen minutes.

Hoping to overcome this limitation, msgpush.com offers iPhone users the option to receive faster notification of new email by providing each user with a “fake Exchange account”.

Here’s how it works: You sign up at msgpush.com. It monitors your IMAP account through IMAP IDLE, and then sends notification of new mail to your iPhone through the Exchange protocol. Sounds clever, but there are some caveats:

1. You need to surrender your username and password for the IMAP account to msgpush.com, which not everyone will feel comfortable about.
2. You need to set up a new Exchange account on the iPhone to receive these notifications. But Exchange only allows you to run one profile at a time. So, if you have one configured already (as I do for my Zimbra account at work), this service is a non-starter.
3. It doesn’t actually read or push the email itself, only a notification that the email is waiting in your account’s inbox. So you still need to retrieve the email manually.
4. It’s still in beta and, according to some users, is proving a little erratic.

Still, even with these quibbles, it may be the solution that some users who can’t wait fifteen minutes are looking for.

I haven’t tested it (see 2. above), but you might like to. Sign up at the msgpush.com web site.

[With thanks to the Fastmail blog and forum posters ]

UPDATE: Tom Yager writes more on push email and the iPhone 3.0 software at InfoWorld. imap, imap idle, exchange, iphone, pushmail, notifications,

A short and glorious life, or a long and dull one?

Owners of the new 3G iPhone face the same dilemma put to the Greek hero Achilles by the gods of Olympus. In the end, he chose glory. But iPhone users might take a different view.

The new phone has a more power-hungry chipset. Walt Mossberg is not the only one who has found “the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20% by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day”.

I take and make much fewer calls than he does, and I notice it too.

Apple has published a page of tips to help users manage this Achilles’ heel.

Much of the advice is common sense: reduce the brightness of the screen, minimise or turn off the phone’s “push” features, turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if you don’t need them, don’t play games on it, and so on.

But three of the suggestions were news to me.

First, you can turn off 3G and still receive calls and data via GPRS and EDGE. Makes sense, but it never occurred to me. You will find the option in the Network section of General Preferences.

Secondly, “applying an equalizer setting to song playback on your iPhone can decrease battery life.” You can switch that off, or set it to “flat” in the phone’s iPod settings.

Lastly, Location Services chews a lot of power. Switching it on only when you need it will prolong the life of your battery.

Finally, it surprised me with its advice on cycling the battery:

For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down).

I have always thought—following someone’s sage advice when I was a gullible new Switcher—that it was important never to let the battery level fall too low. Now I know.

Luckily, just like Achilles my iPhone thirsts for a short and glorious life, so there will be no problem getting the battery charge down.

[Via InformationWeek ]iphone, 3G, battery life, tips, apple, achilles,

After complaining that the IT Department has more important things to do than upgrade our Zimbra installation, I am forced to eat my words.

It was updated this morning, and the new features (see Zimbra’s press release ) are just as sweet as they promised to be (Thanks, Mark. You IT guys are the cat’s pajamas.)

I no longer have to dive into Firefox to use its web interface, and it does feel blisteringly fast in Safari 3.0.

Dialling up the Zimbra 5.0 web interface in Safari on the iPhone now automatically launches its “mobile” interface. It looks good:

It lets you select emails by folder, via Zimbra’s saved searches or by tag. In a nice touch for MailTags users, you can set a Zimbra filter which will pick up a particular plain-text MailTags tag in the x-mailtags header and label it with a corresponding Zimbra tag.

The only downside I can find is no auto-completion of email addresses, which is a pain if you need to compose a new email or forward an existing one.

The calendar on the iPhone is even better than the built-in one.

It respects the colour choices of each calendar so that it is easier at a glance to see if the event is home-related (blue) or work-related (green). In iPhone’s default calendar everything is steely-blue. Stylish but not as informative.

No auto-completion puts iPhone’s mail client ahead for email, but Zimbra’s calendar is now my first port of call for seeing what’s coming up next.

[Hawk Wings readers who are unfamiliar with Zimbra's power, reliability and general open-source goodness can read about it on Zimbra's Product Page .] zimbra, mail.app, apple mail, mailtags, iphone, safari, firefox, productivity

A new version of the Zimbra collaboration suite has been released, which will make Leopard users smile with its support for Safari 3.0, integration of Leopard’s CalDAV features and an optimised iPhone interface.

The update was announced on the same day as Steve’s MWSF keynote, so it seems to have sunk without a trace. That’s a shame, as Zimbra is not only the closet thing that I have ever used to a Microsoft Exchange killer, but also works seamlessly with mail.app. It even plays nicely with MailTags.

I use it at work and it is rock solid. With its iCal-syncing Preference Pane, it also provides the platform-independent email and calendaring interface between me and my PC-using PA.

According to the press release , the Zimbra Team are cock-a-hoop about Leopard. CEO and co-founder of Zimbra, Satish Dharmaraj, says that, “The amazing speed of Safari 3 has blown the Zimbra team away and we are excited to be the first major collaboration platform to support the calendaring standard CalDAV.”

I will admit that I began to drool (a little) at the mention of the iPhone interface:

Additionally, ZCS is now available to iPhone users via the Zimbra Mobile HTML client. The iPhone’s Safari browser enables fast access to the full-featured AJAX interface, and the Zimbra Connector for Apple iSync allows users to sync not only their email but also their address books and calendars to their iPhones.

Unfortunately, the IT Department where I work is currently enjoying some personnel restructuring and doesn’t have the resources to commit to upgrading our installation to the new version anytime soon. Perhaps you will have more luck.

Although it is now owned by Yahoo!, Zimbra retains its open-source roots. An Open Source Edition is available for free. Other, more expensive options including product support are also available. All of them can be explored at the Zimbra web site .

The company is also hiring .zimbra, mail.app, apple mail, leopard, caldav, iphone, safari, opensource, collaboration, microsoft exchange, productivity

The OmniGroup has announced the public beta of OmniFocus, its much talked-about “Getting Things Done” (GTD) app.

In short, it looks good. The press release promises that OmniFocus will help “you work smarter by giving you powerful tools for staying on track of all the things you need to do.” And it lives up to its promise, even in beta form.

GTD Old-timers will immediately recognise OmniFocus’s roots in KinklessGTD , Ethan Schoonover’s collection of applescripts for Getting Things Done with OmniGroup’s OmniOutliner. (Ethan has been a key colloborator on the project and is now OmniGroup’s Head of Marketing.)

For a while, it was the market-leader for its comprehensiveness, its Quicksilver integration and ability to sync smoothly with iCal.

These strengths are carried over into OmniFocus.

The interface has that reassuring Kinkless look:

Depending on whether it is running in Planning or Contexts mode, it lists your projects or your contexts in the lefthand-side column, and the matching content on the righthand-side.

It aims to provide “a big bucket” or comprehensive features for gathering actions or tasks that you need to get done. There’s no point having a GTD app if it can’t easily capture the totality of your tasks, however they come in or occur to you.

To this end, while Quicksilver provided much of the gathering grunt in Kinkless, OminFocus has its own, built-in, system-wide Quick entry tool, with a keyboard shortcut that can be customised in the app’s Preferences:

It also offers a clipping service, that is the ability to clip information from apps like Safari, NetNewsWire and Mail.app when creating a task:

It will even copy across the MailTags project for a clipping if a matching one exists in OmniFocus.

Tabbing across the name of the task, the project, the context and the due date is quick and easy. It even knows that tomorrow is Monday, 19 November. (UPDATE: In order to see the Due Date field in the Quick Entry pane, you will need first to Check the View > Columns > Due Date option in OmniFocus.)

It is also possible to email tasks to yourself, using the Mail rule that OmniFocus installs for you, which automatically shunts any email with a subject line starting with “– ” (or whatever you set in the preferences) into its Inbox for processing later, then archiving the email into the folder you choose.

The collecting process has been carefully thought through, and it shows. Nice.

Processing tasks, sorting them into projects and the contexts in which they can be done, is done in the app’s Inbox. It’s all tab-friendly and it’s smart — auto-matching of existing projects and contexts and smart parsing of dates makes the processing quick and consistent.

Syncing with iCal is even smarter than I remember it in Kinkless. OmniFocus now allows you to decide which iCal calendar to use for which contexts, reducing the clutter in iCal and making for better “synergy” between my Omnifocus office context and iCal work calendar:

And of course it makes use of the new Leopard Mail.app-iCal to-do syncing, which brings OmniFocus to-dos through into Mail.app’s to-do list, each one optionally prefixed with its Omnifocus context:

Thanks to the magic of iPhone, I then have my to-dos with me wherever I go (although not the clipped information which is unhelpfully wrapped up in a mime attachment).

(UPDATE: There is a trick here though. By default, to-dos piped into Mail.app are stored in the “On My Mac” to-do folder. It’s a pain, but you can drag them into the to-do mailbox of an account that your iPhone checks. Obviously, it would be better if this was automated but I don’t think that you can apply rules to to-dos.)

Still, if you take care in writing the names of your to-dos, the iPhone will even highlight the phone number of the person you need to call:

Unfortunately, my iPhone can’t take a photo of itself. Apologies for the quality.

I am liking this app very much, much better than other GTD solutions for Mac users. I took advantage of the special pre-release offer about fifteen minutes after installing the beta.

OmniFocus is available for a limited time at the pre-release price of USD 39.95 (and 25% cheaper than that for people who have a OmniOutliner 3.0 licence. So, it only cost me USD 29.95).

When released on 8 January it will sell for USD 79.95. Expensive, you say? You’re right. Good value, you ask? It depends what your time is worth.

You can also watch Ethan showing off OmniFocus at length in a new fifteen minute video tour or download the “At-a-glance” Quick Reference Chart. Links on OmniGroup’s OmniFocus web page .omnifocus, gtd, getting things done, mail.app, apple mail, ical, productivity, kinkless, iphone, sweet as a nut

Hmmm…. Late to the party on this one, but still worth posting.

Derek Punsalan has posted a comprehensive guide to getting Gmail’s new IMAP service, Apple Mail and the iPhone’s Mail.app working together in perfect harmony.

He explains how to mail the special folders in Mail.app (Sent, Draft, Trash) to the correct ones in your Gmail account, and then how to match them in the Gmail account on your iPhone.

He also provides a summary of several clever tips that were left in the 212 comments to the post, including how to use Gmail without all the Gmail folder hierarchy, and how Mail.app flags and Gmail stars are the same thing.

Curiously, he doesn’t mention a tip for email hoarders. If you like to keep everything, select Gmail’s all mail folder and under Mail.app’s Mailbox > Use this mailbox for… menu option, select Trash.

Then your delete key becomes a quick archive shortcut.

Of course, there are many reasons why this might be a bad idea — See an earlier Hawk Wings post on Why the delete key is your best friend.

[Via just about everyone]mail.app, apple mail, gmail, google, imap, iphone, folders, tips

Hawk Wings reader and iLounge writer Jesse David Hollington got to play with an iPhone briefly at MWSF and to ask Apple a few direct questions about the email client on the iPhone.

He emails to say that it was a brief encounter (five minutes with the people from Apple and a 45 second play with the device), but still:

I had noticed your entry on Hawk Wings about 30 minutes before we went in, so we were able to pose the question to Apple specifically as to whether rich-text e-mail was supported, and the answer I posted was basically their answer. When asked whether the Mail application on the iPhone was a “pared-down” version of Apple Mail, they basically responded in somewhat non-committal PR-speak.

Apple confirmed that composing in true HTML is not possible. It looks more and more like “Mail.app Mobile” to me.

You read the full write-up of the iLounge team’s impressions on the iLounge site .mail.app, apple mail, iphone, apple, rich html, html, mobile, cell phone, PR spin