On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 01:13:45AM -0800, Ibn Al Athir wrote: > Thanks for the reply! > > I see; that makes sense. So, if I wanted to limit my battery/data/RAM usage > it would be best to use polling at an interval that's not too short, and to > disable pushing altogether? Does it make any difference that there are a > lot of old emails in my inbox? (I think I read something about that in the > FAQ.)
To clarify: Polling will establish a new connection to the mail server, request the list of messages (possibly limited to the most recent N messages if you have the Local Folder Size setting set), and download any new messages that it doesn't already have (limited by the Fetch Messages Up To size limit). Push establishes a long-lived connection (called IDLE in IMAP) that allows the server to send a notice to the client when new messages appear. Typically these connections only transfer a small amount of keep-alive packets when there are no new message notices. Push is not affected by the number of messages in the box, but it is affected by how many folders have push enabled (as each folder needs its own connection). > And is/are polling and/or pushing still active when my phone is on standby? They are both intended to be active, however some android devices have aggressive power savings measures that will kill background net connections or timers. Often times a user will have to explicitly disable "battery optimiztion" for the K-9 app to allow push connections to stay alive. The most battery efficient mode is push disabled, never automatic poll, and just do manual polls when needed. The next best option is occasional automatic polling (e.g. once per hour). If you need more timely notifications, enable push and set an automatic poll interval to something slightly longer (e.g. every 3 hours). > Also, just out of curiosity, what method of fetching mail do most other > email apps use? I haven't seen any app other than K9 where you can actually > configure it by yourself. Many apps that are distributed solely on the google play store make use of the google play APIs, which includes a mechanism for sending push notifications via a user's google account. This mechanism is also exempt from the power savings background task killer, and google heavily suggests using this API instead of apps doing their own push systems. I personally don't like the thought of google seeing all my push notifications, so I'm more than happy to continue using K-9 and its IDLE-based push notifications. >>> I think I prefer K9 mail, but it does seem to have one "problem" compared >>> to the other two: In any give time period, K9 takes up about 3% of my >>> battery usage, while the other two mail apps use less than 1%, even if all >>> three apps are just running in the background (most battery usage goes to >>> my screen, my browser and several system apps). Just one note about this: these percentages are pretty rough approximations. The phone doesn't really have a good way to actually measure the real power consumed by an individual app. I would consider 1% and 3% to be equivalent usage amounts. --Sean -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "K-9 Mail" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to k-9-mail+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/k-9-mail/20200205193009.GA19375%40bailey.
