A new push-capable app, aptly named PushMail, aims to bring push notifications to your e-mail, regardless of service provider. Being that my primary e-mail account is through Gmail, which does not yet provide push delivery of new messages to the iPhone’s built-in e-mail app, I was excited to give PushMail a try.

How PushMail accomplishes this is rather interesting. As part of the app’s install and setup process, you create a PushMail account, which actually creates a new e-mail address on the dopushmail.com domain. You then configure your e-mail service provider to forward a copy of all new messages (keeping a copy in your inbox) to this PushMail e-mail address.

Yes, you have to forward your e-mail to someone else. PushMail says they do not keep a copy of any messages, nor do they provide any way to access your e-mail messages. The alert your iPhone receives will include the sender’s name, the subject line, and the beginning of the e-mail message. After the alert is pushed, the e-mail message is discarded. You will have to decide on your own whether the benefit of push notifications are worth the potential issues of having your e-mail sent to a third-party.

PushMail does not provide an interface to read or send e-mail. You will still use the iPhone’s built-in Mail app, or access your provider’s mobile web interface as you have been. The app is simply a push notification service, and at that it functions very well. Each push alert was received on my iPhone within 20 seconds of the message being delivered into my Gmail inbox. After tapping to dismiss the alert, you have to manually launch the Mail app and navigate to the proper account and inbox folder. It would be nice if PushMail provided an option to dismiss or launch Mail app, just to streamline the process a bit.

I’ve set the e-mail check interval on my iPhone to 1 hour, to preserve battery life, since using PushMail alerts me to new messages immediately, and the schedule setting doesn’t affect your other push e-mail services (MobileMe, Yahoo, Exchange). You could also set the e-mail check interval to manual if you wanted to save a little more juice, and just have Mail sync up when you launched it after getting a PushMail alert.

Even though the thought of having all my incoming e-mail copied to a third-party is rather disconcerting, I’ve decided to forgo my initial concern and give it a try. I suppose you could also create filters and rules in Gmail to handle this forwarding, instead of forwarding all new message, to better control which mail gets pushed and which does not (and therefore doesn’t leave your inbox). I may actually do this myself to eliminate some notifications for newsletters and other mail I have no interest in knowing about the moment (or second) it arrives.

If real-time push notifications are important for you, and you’re using an e-mail service that does not support push on the iPhone (anything other than MobileMe, Yahoo, Exchange), then PushMail is a viable solution. Keep in mind that to accomplish this, PushMail requires that you forward your e-mail to their servers. Make sure your e-mail service allows you to forward incoming e-mail while also retaining the original copy in your inbox.

You can visit PushMail’s website, or purchase on the iTunes App Store for $4.99 (link).

Update: I received an e-mail back from PushMail’s dev, in response to some of the privacy and security questions I raised during this review. I’ve decided to post his exact response here. It sounds like he’s done everything possible to ensure PushMail is as secure as possible.

Hi Josh,

Thanks a lot for your review which I just read. To answer some of your
concerns about security, here is what I just wrote to someone who
voiced similar concerns:

“Believe me, I share your concerns and I have architectured this app as
securely as possible:
- you do not have to give away your mail account credentials: it is
you who forward the mails for which you would like to receive a
notification
- the contents of the e-mail and the addresses are never stored to
persistent storage: they only live in memory for the time needed to
build the notification payload, after which they discarded
- the passwords used for your dopushmail account is never sent nor
stored in clear, only a secure hash is transmitted
- the mails you forward to the dopushmail server are sent in clear,
but that’s exactly what they did to reach your own mail provider in
the first place, so that does not change the overall security of the
system
- finally, you can set up specific rules (at least in Gmail, or with
procmail on Unix systems) to exclude from notification any sensitive
email (from your bank, etc)”

Best regards,

Simon Patarin

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