iPhone/Yahoo Uses P-IMAP, not IMAP IDLE?

According to several reports, the iPhone's push email capability with Yahoo email comes from the P-IMAP draft proposal, not the IDLE function in IMAP. Daniel Miessler's post on IDLE and P-IMAP does a good job of clarifying the two.

This would support the observations of some message board posters that they aren't getting pushed email even though their email service provider uses IMAP and supports the IDLE extension.

I haven't heard of anyone outside of Yahoo who supports P-IMAP, so Yahoo may have a lock-in for now.

Others are speculating that the version of OS X on the iPhone is one that includes a snapshot of the P-IMAP extension support from the upcoming Leopard (10.5) release that's restricted to Yahoo. The hope is that when Leopard is released this Fall the P-IMAP support won't be locked down to just Yahoo, leveling the playing field for other email service providers who may wish to offer this functionality.

I still recommend that folks move away from POP3 email systems and towards IMAP ones, but this does complicate the selection of your service provider. The uptake rate of P-IMAP functionality by service providers is hard to predict, so there's no sure choice at the moment as to who will implement it.

If pushmail is your top priority, then Yahoo is your only option and you'll have to deal with all the drawbacks of POP3 client access when using mail.app (or any other POP3 client) and Yahoo's webmail interface.

If mailbox sanity and ubiquitous message access are your top priorities, then you'll still want to look at .Mac or AOL Mail. (I've been researching other, specialized IMAP service providers and should have a buyer's guide post in the next several days.)

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