Help URGENT: I need instantaneous (to the second) notifications on Gmail or lose all my income to competi

[VeryStressed987654321]

I have a job as a contractor where the agency will send out emails containing jobs at random intervals throughout the day which include a link at the bottom which allows you to "accept" the job if you are free. These jobs are extremely competitive, and if I take so much as two seconds to hit that accept link, nine times out of ten it will have already been taken to somebody else receiving the group email.

As a result, if I receive the Gmail 'push' notification for a new email even a second after somebody else does, it means that I have no income, so this is causing a very large amount of stress. I have tested my phone and noticed that I sometimes receive a notification about five seconds after sending the email, but this varies, and it is often 19 seconds or sometimes a minute.

I have read everywhere that the 'push' notifications are instantaneous and I agree that for 99.9% of people this can be considered instantaneous, but for me, every fraction of a second is the difference between getting paid or not.

As such I really need something that will make these notifications absolutely instantaneous - an app or an addon? Something I can do to the settings or the phone? Obviously I have Gmail set to sync the inbox and have a loud notify tone. Should I turn off wifi? I really need some help from somebody who knows.

Another question that occurred to me is that my gmail address starts with a "w" --- When an email is sent to a large number of addresses, do the addresses starting with a, b, c, etc receive the email first? Does it send alphabetically? Failing that, is there an email server other than Gmail that will receive mail faster?

This is adding a huge amount of stress for me so somebody please help me out.

 

[Hadron]

If you are using an IMAP account with push notifications I can't think of any way of speeding it up. How the mails are routed through the Internet, how busy particular servers are, will also affect timing (and these things will vary). If you used the same mailserver as the sender it would be quicker, otherwise I don't think there's much you can do.

As for order of sending, it's most likely going to depend on the order in the sender's mailing list. What that is I don't have any way of knowing - they may just add new addresses to the end rather than have a particular order.

There may be mail systems which respond quicker than others, but I don't have any information on that. The time to get to the mailserver will still be variable though (which is why the one thing I could think of was using the same email service as the sender, if that is possible - which quite possibly is not).

I'm sorry, but I can't really think of any way of helping.

 

[mikedt]

Sounds like a very flawed system. This is trying to be real-time thing, where seconds matter, email was just never intended to work like that. Mail servers and forwarders can take their time, no urgency, mailing lists might take a while to work through, what's at the top of the list comes first, lists are in no particular order. It's a lottery.

 

[FishenFool]

Ummm yeah they should be using some kind of group messaging thing. Since they don't you might want to try to setup Maildroid to deal with your Push Gmail situation. It is supposed to be very good at doing Push Mail.

 

[Crashdamage]

There is no magic bullet for this. VeryStressed competitors are in the same position he is - they get the notification when they get them. For example, we have several devices with the same email accounts, using the same setup and the same email client. When 3 or 4 of them are in the same room together and email arrives, sometimes they go off almost perfectly simultaneously, but sometimes it's as much as 5-10 seconds apart. Mind you, this is when they all a getting mail on the same account. When email is sent to multiple accounts with different providers and systems, who knows how close together notifications arrive.

 

[maildroiddev]

There is no magic bullet for this. VeryStressed competitors are in the same position he is - they get the notification when they get them. For example, we have several devices with the same email accounts, using the same setup and the same email client. When 3 or 4 of them are in the same room together and email arrives, sometimes they go off almost perfectly simultaneously, but sometimes it's as much as 5-10 seconds apart. Mind you, this is when they all a getting mail on the same account. When email is sent to multiple accounts with different providers and systems, who knows how close together notifications arrive.

CrashDamage is right, there is no magic bullet here. To your questions:

1. I believe CrashDamage wrote this in a past post, but I will reiterate that GMail using the GMail app is True Push while MD and other email clients like ours will use Idle Push. Basically, Idle Push relies on a network connection to send a noop request and if the network has a hiccup or is down for a moment, you will have an issue. True Push does not work exactly like that, but also obviously can have connection issues or bugs (for example, I also use the GMail app to compare speeds with our app and last month on one of my devices the GMail app stopped pushing and I had to manually refresh, it was like my ID was out of sync on their server for one device). So, no magic bullet, but we all try to add tricks. MD has different tricks to re-connect and noop approaches different than other clients.

2. It depends how their server sends mail. If they are sending for example with a mass mail program that will merge fields, it usually does that on a queue and in batches and often those batches are alphabetically read from a file, excel spreadsheet, database etc. So it gets sent to the mail server in batches and those will get sent first. But, as noted in point one it does not mean that someone will get something before you.

You asked about a good mail server for push. I like GMail for free but if you want to pay, I personally like fastmail.fm. They are a really good mail server with really great push service.