Let's discuss: push mail for Exchange

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Surprised? Why?

This whole thread is full of "no, I will not use a cloud based solution even if someone held a gun to my head".

Why should I spend the time to develop something that nobody wants to use?

And about AS, I've always been clear that I chose EWS instead, and never held back explaining why.

My turn to be surprised.

[stevealb]

I don't remember saying I was surprised, just disappointed. You have an amazing email client that just falls short of my exchange needs. 

[BPretzel]

I am not sure if I have missed the point or not.... Do most exchange accounts support IMAP? My Office365 account does and I have been "playing" with Aqua Mail. Like many of the correspondents here, message push is quite important to me but I also want to take advantage of the benefitsthat Exchange can bring (even with EWS).

So, here is my work around: I have set up my Office365 account twice - once as an Exchange account with EWS, set never to sync and excluded from the Smart Folder, and once as an IMAP account (using STARTTLS and ports 143 for in and 25 for out). I am basically using the IMAP for the finer control and push mail that it gives me but the Exchange versions should I want to take advantage of the server side support (eg searching my on-line address book etc). I get a lot more options to tune my account in IMAP so that is the one I am syncing and using most - indeed, I may drop the EWS one entirely if I find I do not use it enough...
This is not the most elegant work around but it does work (apart from the occasional clash between the two copies of the same account with different protocols - and of course my unread message count (all accounts) goes a bit haywire) ... sort of.
It strikes me that perhaps something similar (but much neater) could be implemented in the next update to give apparent push e-mail and some of the nicer IMAP features whilst also offering EWS (ie entirely hiding on version of the account and only triggering it for specific EWS related options)? Or maybe I am just lucky that (my) Office365 seems to support both protocols?
Best wishes, Boris.

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Yes, Exchange (and Office 365 in particular) does support IMAP and it even has IMAP IDLE (push mail).

The drawback is -- there are some Exchange specific things not accessible with IMAP, that is, the recently added Calendar sync and the already existing Contact lookup (including personal address book and corporate directory).

Your workaround is just fine for someone like me, but most users want it to "just work", oh well.

[BPretzel]

Yes, Exchange (and Office 365 in particular) does support IMAP and it even has IMAP IDLE (push mail).

The drawback is -- there are some Exchange specific things not accessible with IMAP, that is, the recently added Calendar sync and the already existing Contact lookup (including personal address book and corporate directory).

Your workaround is just fine for someone like me, but most users want it to "just work", oh well.

Update. I appear, the way I have set it up, to run in to problems with the IMAP office365 account. It works fine immediately after installation and after reediting (but actually not changing) the account settings but then runs in to trouble trying to download complete messages or respond to them. I get error messages of the type:
"Error loading complete message.
 Error connecting."

Of course this might be totally unrelated to anything in AM but I suspect the practice of having two connections to a single account is perhaps not so good! I will try investigating further - and maybe making the EWS account the main version and sync only the inbox with minimal caching in IMAP version - and will also try justy running the IMAP account without the EWS copy to see how that works but if you have any suggestions - I would be most grateful to hear them!

Best wishes, Boris.

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Not to question what you're seeing, but both IMAP and EWS allow multiple concurrent connections from same or different devices.

[stevealb]

Hi Kostya,

What is your vision for email on EWS? Is that what you're focusing on next?

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Steve, not sure I understand the question...

Email for EWS? Aqua has had email for EWS for about 18 months, what am I missing?

No, I'm not going to shift the app's focus to Exchange at the expense of other types of mail accounts (IMAP) if that's what you're asking. If not, please clarify.

[stevealb]

I was just asking if you're going to expand any of the options in email on exchange, such as categories for email, working on the appearance, push, etc.

[Kostya Vasilyev]

>> categories for email

Haven't though of that, so not in the near / midterm

>> working on the appearance

Um, can you clarify on that too?

"Make emails look exactly like in Outlook"?

>> push

Good idea. I'm going to create a forum topic and throw out some thoughts on push for Exchange.

I have this idea of using a cloud service to make EWS push more suitable for mobile devices, will post details there.

Oh wait, didn't I already create a topic for that?

[chris3g]

I'm not sure if the decision has already been made, but i personally would consider using a cloud-based service to get push mail delivered for my EWS account.

[chris3g]

I'm not sure if the decision has already been made, but i personally would consider using a cloud-based service to get push mail delivered for my EWS account.

And do you accept to pay a monthly fee of 1 dollar (or more) to get it?

Yes, probably no more than ~ $30 yearly.

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Ah, hello, I think that makes you the first one

Message threading / conversation is certainly higher priority to me, but if there is enough interest by the time I finish that...

I'd also like to point out that I'm thinking that this cloud service 1) would not persistently store or index message content and 2) would not persistently store the user's credentials (both of these are different from how "cloud centric" apps appear to work, Outlook, BlueMail, etc.)

So even if the service gets broken into (we all know it happens even to large companies) -- the credentials won't leak.

[mikeone]

I think this decision has already been taken by Kostya.  See one of his previous posts in this thread:
http://www.aqua-mail.com/forum/index.php?topic=3195.msg16901#msg16901

> If you are preferring a cloud based mail service then how about using CloudMagic or a similar mail app ...? 

[mobamoba]

I'm not sure how badly this would affect battery life, but one thought might be to drastically reduce the amount of time between EWS syncs from the current minimum of 5 minutes down to, say, every 30 seconds or even every 1 second. While it wouldn't be push, it would be close enough to real-time to mimic push.