Quick App: PushMail for iPhone, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. Push Notification Relay
PushMail [$4.99 - iTunes link] takes a different approach to working around the lack of push notifications for Gmail, Hotmail, and other email services on the iPhone. When you set up PushMail, you’re prompted to create an account on their servers ([username]@dopushmail.com). You then forward email from Gmail, Hotmail, etc. to that PushMail account (using whatever filters or rules you like), and when PushMail gets the forward, it sends a push notification to your iPhone, alerting you that your Gmail, Hotmail, etc. account has email.
You can also forward more than one account to the Pushmail account.
If you give it a try, let us know how it works for you.
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Works great !
I bought this on 10th Aug. But, I want to know when they’ll implement multiple notifications…
Like Eric says, works great. I put it through a number of tests when I got it. First, it won’t push emails you send yourself; I tested this with my gmail account and it just doesn’t work. Second, messages push within seconds. My girlfriend sent me a number of emails which I got within one to two seconds. Third, it doesn’t redirect you to mail; you can’t tap the push notification to open email… Kinds stinks in that regard.
Ummm… no. I’m not going to forward email onto a 3rd party server just to know I got an email. If I really wanted push Gmail, then I’d need to send all my email through a 3rd party server and I’m not comfortable with that. I’ll wait until Google and Apple make nice to get push GMail straight from the source.
I’m gonna wait for GPush before I make a decision. GPush is supposed to be released in the next 24hrs w/ a sale price of .99 (reg price $1.99). But for others that use other mail services, I suppose this is the app for you.
Once again users are forced into a fugly kludge because of the Control Freak-fest that is Apple.
i got it yesterday and it works great. i am not to scared about sending my email to a 3rd party. i will use this till gpush is out and “working” ill be out a whole 5 bucks, oh well.
good job!
Another option is to foward your gmail to a hotmail account and turn on mobile alerts. You will get an alert on your iphone when a email is received.
I’d rather wait the 15 minutes for my mail to show than send my email to a 3rd party server, and at $4.99?? no thank you
@Hudson – while I don’t use gmail, with yahoo mail if I send an email to myself it doesn’t show up in my inbox either, I have to go to my sent folder. Could that be why it didn’t push?
Incidently, yahoo had had push since day one. A little slow at times, who’s fault it is I have no idea. But it’s near instant most of the time.
Confused. Why pay $4.99 for this app when you can do the same thing with Yahoo Mail? Yahoo pushes mail so you can forward your Gmail (not sure about Hotmail) to Yahoo and then that message will be pushed to your iPhone. Best of all, it’s free.
I purchased this a week ago when it came out (I wanted it to be like Blackberry push). It met everyone of my expectations. It notified me immediately of an email from Gmail, my IP server, and from specific friends. For $4.99, I cannot ask for anything better. Sounds like Gpush is still having problems with GMail.
@Melo:
Wise choice.
How can email be BOTH so critical that you have to know the instant it arrives AND so unimportant you can freely share it with some upstart third party?
Yahoo may push email, you may be able to check every 15 minutes, blah blah. All that does is show you a number on the badge. You still have to actually open the email app to see who the email was from. 90% of the time I don’t care.
PushMail provides POPUP NOTIFICATIONS. Meaning, when you get an email a pop notification appears and tells you who the email is from, the subject, and part of the message. I simply look down, see the popup. I can then decide if I need to respond. No need to even touch the phone if I don’t want to.
I get people’s worry about sending email to a 3rd party, but lets be real. You really think this guy is going to bother sifting through the hundreds, thousands, etc. of email and doing something malicious. I think not. The guy developed an app to make money, not to F people over.
i used yahoo mail for push, it works fine, but “pushmail” pops a msg on my screen and tells me who the email is from and the first few lines. i like that, i get so much email ina day its nice to be notified but not have to open a mail app to check what it is.
Why would anyone do this? yahoo email pushes your messages to you. And it’s free to set up a yahoo email and forward your other email addresses to the yahoo account to get push. Why pay 5 dollars for something you can get free.
My experiences with Yahoo is that the email service is inconsistent in pushing the email to the iphone. It can be a matter of seconds or hours until you receive your notication. Plus you will not get all your gmail labels that you have created in gmail.
Enough about Yahoo and Exchange or Fetch. This app does what those do not do. PushMail saves me TIME. Lots of it. Without a pop up notification, you have to launch the mail app, see who the email is from, close the app. That alone takes about 5 seconds. If you get 20 emails a day, over the course of a year that adds up to 10 hours. With PushMail I receive a pop up notification, and that’s it. I don’t lose those 5 seconds of having to launch the app and see who it’s from. Time is money people!
don’t really see a point, the same way you can setup mail2web which offers free exchange and have push for free and most likely more reliable and straight to email account
Works fine and very fast. Provide Popup in the Lockscreen with Name of sender, subject and part of message (like a SMS). Don’t need to open Mail every time to see incoming mail.
I found the new mail sound frustrating due to the fact I’d gone to the effort to change my UIsystem sound. So handy hint for this app : ssh into the app and replace ‘p.caf’ with your desired sound. I then needed to restart the app before it would recognise the change. Shackle-less iPhone required.
PushMail is the closest thing to 100% functional push Gmail that I’ve found for the iPhone. I tried GPush; it didn’t work, and the badge notifications showed 245 emails unread even after I’d run a filter in Gmail to mark EVERYTHING read. I tried forwarding my Gmail to Yahoo Mail, and that worked for like a day, and then mysteriously all notifications — the bleep, the badge notifications — stopped working. I tried Nuevasync; that didn’t work either, no notifications at all. I tried PushMail, and while the badge notifications still don’t work, at least now I get a bleep and a preview message. It’s near-instant, it’s functional, it’s cheap, I’m happy.
Anyone who really needs a communication device first and foremost — you know, functional push mail from multiple sources, previews, text messages that arrive the day they’re sent, the ability to place a call or access the internet even when at a concert with loads of other users about — has no business owning an iPhone; the Palm Pre on Sprint will do those things better. But for those of us like me, who insist on owning an iPhone so that our phone can double as an iPod and a Game Boy, this app goes a long toward remedying one of the shortcomings of our beloved handset.
Get over it and stop worrying about a third party being big brother. The company wants to stay in business and is not about to do something assinine like using your email wrongly.
There is no way I would send my emails to a third party solutions unless the source says they’re trusted.
So, I’ve got this running. A few points:
You can use filters on gmail to only redirect a copy of certain emails to your phone. So you can have it only popup if your subject contains the word “URGENT” for example
You can have different filtering on the phone itself to assign different tones to different people, different subjects, etc.
You can now configure what the app does when you click the button under the mail. You can have it open Mail, open a url (i.e. go to your gmail webmail) etc etc.
You can turn off alerts automatically at different times of the day (e.g. I don’t want to be disturbed when I’m asleep.) These can also be edited on a per user / per subject level.
Hi and thanks for the write-up.
How far will Yahoo! actually push the mail to me? I am in a very far far away remote place.