BIS customers now getting instant IMAP e-mail
by Volker Weber
A quiet BlackBerry Internet Service upgrade has been rolled out that according to many is resulting in much quicker e-mail delivery over IMAP.
It's very easy to check whether your IMAP server understands IDLE. Just telnet to port 143 and issue two commands: "a001 CAPABILITY" makes the server lists its capabilities and "a002 LOGOUT" disconnects from the server. If IDLE is listed as a capability, you are good.
Comments
Don't type so much: any ASCII character instead of a001 will do. :-) E.g.
. capability
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 UNSELECT IDLE NAMESPACE QUOTA XLIST CHILDREN XYZZY
. OK Thats all she wrote!
. logout
Hey, I am just trying to be nice to the server. :-)
Not too surprisingly, Domino doesn't support it, even in the 8.5 beta that I run on my servers:
* OK Domino IMAP4 Server Build V85_M1_05262008 ready Sat, 6 Sep 2008 21:57:37 +0100
a001 CAPABILITY
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 AUTH=PLAIN LITERAL+ NAMESPACE QUOTA UIDPLUS
a001 OK CAPABILITY completed
Here is what my server has to say:
a001 CAPABILITY
* CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 ACL QUOTA LITERAL+ MAILBOX-REFERRALS NAMESPACE UIDPLUS ID NO_ATOMIC_RENAME UNSELECT CHILDREN MULTIAPPEND BINARY SORT THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES ANNOTATEMORE IDLE STARTTLS AUTH=CRAM-MD5 AUTH=DIGEST-MD5 AUTH=NTLM SASL-IR X-NETSCAPE
a001 OK Completed
IMAP is a checklist feature in Notes/Domino to demonstrate "support for open standards". You are not supposed to actually use it.
My server supports IDLE, as you can see here:
* CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 SASL-IR SORT THREAD=REFERENCES MULTIAPPEND UNSELECT LITERAL+ IDLE CHILDREN NAMESPACE LOGIN-REFERRALS STARTTLS AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=DIGEST-MD5
Unfortunately my dumb phone doesn't. At least it doesn't on my server, even if it should support it. Or maybe it doesn't like the self signed certificates for TLS.
Unlikely. If you can fetch you mail without an error caused by the cert, then it should also do IDLE. If you do get an error, that is the culprit.
I found the reason for this. I use IMAP with TLS (using a self-signed certificate), and the phone didn't like that. I had to connect one time without TLS, and then it recognized IDLE. After that i could switch back to TLS, and it still works. For the record: i'm talking about a W880i from Sony-Ericsson.
But it's killing the battery - after a few hours it was dead empty. Maybe i should switch UMTS off for this.
Try this: without UMTS, connect, make a phone call, and see if it re-connects.
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