Help Exchange Push Email

[andrewduerden]

My work has an exchange sever and I have set my phone to "automatic push" under the "email check frequency" settings. This means when an email comes into my work inbox my phone beeps straight away.

Does this mean that my phone is somehow maintaining a constant connection to the mail server or does the mail server somehow ping my phone when a new message comes in? If the former is true then this setting is going to be a major battery drain and I'll turn it off.

Thanks

 

[andrewduerden]

Found my answer here for those who are interested ...

What is Push Email?

Push email can drain your battery more than pull email if you receive lots of email frequently through the day. For example if you receive 15 emails in one hour and have your phone set to push, your phone connects 15 times to download the emails. If you have it set to check every hour it only connects the once.

Thats how I understand it anyway.

 

[balazer]

Your understanding is incorrect. In most push e-mail systems, the client maintains a connection to the server. Just having a connection open doesn't use any power. Sending and receiving data is what uses power. To keep an idle connection open indefinitely, you just have to send occasional keep-alives, which are small and sent at large intervals (15-30 minutes), so they don't use much power. An Android phone can maintain several such connections with negligible impact on its battery life. (and that is the typical case for an Android phone, which is syncing Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar by default)

The actual e-mail data delivered to the phone is no different whether using push or polling, assuming that your polling e-mail client downloads entire messages. In fact, push e-mail will use less power than polling at 5-minute intervals, because significant amounts of data are transferred each time you connect to the mail server to poll for new messages. Polling is more power efficient than push e-mail if the polling interval is very long, like an hour, or maybe more.

Where you achieve power savings vs. push e-mail is when your e-mail client checks for new messages on demand (and you don't demand it too frequently), or when your e-mail client can download just message headers, and full messages only for the messages that you choose to read.


Just try push e-mail for a while and see how your battery holds up. If you don't receive a ton of messages, you'll be fine.