A while ago I was totally in love with push but times change and I'm using a lot of BetterBatteryStats nowadays and noticed the many alarms and wakelocks aquamail creates and after much reading in AM's forum and xda etc I have to note the following:
1) I know that kostya considers BBS unreliable, but it's trusted by millions of people around the world and it can be a great monitor (and even "medicine" as someone suggested) for what's going on "behind the scenes" in our phones, not only in terms of battery
2) So, I had push enabled (and the "watchdog" of 15 minutes) and messages to check set to 100 messages,
but I hated AM every time I checked BBS's graph it was full of wakelocks (most probably by AM) when my screen was off,
I turned off push, kept the watchdog and limited the messages to 15,
3) Maybe IMAP IDLE gmail push implementation (I can't tell if AM or gmail is responsible and I wouldn't care, but it is),
because I have other apps that push notifications to me, none is top in alarms or wakelocks section!
They don't even show up!
Maybe because the server pushes the notification whenever there is one,
on the contrary I think AM wakes up the phone each 10+ times per hour (with the previous mentioned configuration) in order to check if there is a new message?
I think this alone is unacceptable in terms of battery life and usage