Hi, for work, I really need immediate, clear notification of any email I get. I got geary working, but it didn't really offer this, and I didn't see a way to get it to do so in the settings. Any tips? Thanks!
Has anyone done a comparison between geary and epiphany with respect to immediacy of notifications? I think the android gmail app will be hard to beat in this respect...
The Android Gmail app is using a service in the background where a delivery notification is pushed from the remote end of a connection to google (not gmail.)
Any email client that supports the "IDLE" verb can do something similar without an 3rd party service provided the server supports it (most do.) You will not get immediate notifications during *sleep* because neither the modem nor the WiFi firmware support waking the phone up for network traffic alone (the WiFi card does support WoL so if you can get a WoL packet to the phone when you get an email then you'll get instant notifications during sleep.) I don't know if that will change in the future.
What you can do to get notifications with a latency in the minutes range while still getting decent battery life is use RTCWake instead of sleeping the device. This is often what Android does (maybe the gmail app does it to.) You'll want to tune the sleep period so it's bellow the keep alive period for your mail service or make sure it's awake for long enough to reconnect.
I can understand needing this if work is imposing it but people really need to understand that email was not designed to be an instant messaging application. There are many things that can delay or prevent the delivery of an email message.
As a baseline, I timed the delivery of gmail notifications to the Android app on an LG V20 running LineageOS. Maybe I'll do the same with Geary and Evolution on a PinePhone running Mobian soon, to quantify the difference.
When the V20 was awake, regardless of whether the phone was locked or unlocked, gmail notifications came on average 2 minutes after sending the email, plus or minus 1 minute.
When the V20 had not been used for 15 minutes (presumably dozing), gmail notifications came on average 8 minutes after sending the email, plus or minus 3 minutes.
As the esteemed Zebulon Walton points out for us, email is *not* designed as an instant messaging protocol.
I haven't tried to solve this further. I have a very specific use case, where I'm liable to lose income if I don't respond to project offers from my agency within a certain period, and I can't get them to use a different medium. I'm sure there are plenty of analogous use cases, so it would be a nice feature to work out.
tl;dr: If the PinePhone is charging or the wifi is otherwise kept connected, email notifications come very quickly indeed.
Full story:
I've timed some notifications. My setup is: Geary logged into a gmail account via an app-specific password. PinePhone is on wifi only, not cell connection. PinePhone is running Mobian, not Postmarket. I consider the blue LED flashing to be the notification.
If the PinePhone screen is on, or if it is charging, then the time between email sent and Phone notification is 17 seconds plus or minus 1 second, indicating that it's actually faster even than the Android push notification!
If the PinePhone is not charging and the screen has been off for more than 5 minutes... the notification never comes. Presumably the wifi goes to sleep and doesn't come back up. This may be different on PostmarketOS, but on Mobian this is what I observe. Note that there are some user-generated hax to keep the wifi awake which may make this solution viable.
Note also a weird phenomenon in which, exactly 4 minutes after the screen turns off, the blue LED flashes for exactly 1 minute regardless of whether any notification is received. Again this may be Mobian-specific.
