Boxcar – the social networking tool that pushes notifications from social networking sources like email, Twitter, or Facebook long before notifications were available in iOS 5 – has been part of my repertoire for Gmail notifications when my beloved Push Gmail became unstable.
In my case, the service sends a push notification of a new email to my iPhone after receiving emails forwarded to a unique Boxcar email address. After the notification has been pushed, the emails are then discarded on Boxcar’s end, while the original email remains on the initiating email server (in my case by the setting, “keep Gmail’s copy in the Inbox”).
This free service relies on Boxcar servers being operational, however, and when they are unavailable, the backlog and resulting annoyances pile up quickly. And that’s what happened to me yesterday.
For example, not only did I stop receiving any email notifications, but each email unsuccessfully forwarded to Boxcar resulted in a “MAIL DELIVERY SUBSYSTEM” -Delay or Failure – error email back into my Inbox:
Delivery to the following recipient has been delayed:
Message will be retried for 2 more day(s)
Technical details of temporary failure:
The recipient server did not accept our requests to connect. Learn more at http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?answer=7720
[(10) push.boxcar.io. [173.192.56.11]:25: Connection refused]
After a day offline, Boxcar’s service is back online and now I’m getting what seems like non-stop notifications of several days’ worth of notifications that didn’t make it the first time. When I realized what was happening at the end of my workday yesterday, I turned Forwarding off in Gmail settings, but as the email above indicated, I may have to suffer for up to two more days if I keep Boxcar on my iPhone.
This isn’t the first time this has happened – and its erratic behavior is pushing (pun-intended) my buttons. The last time I submitted “feedback” to the developers through the app but never received any response.
What about you? If you don’t use Gmail as an Exchange server (like through Google Apps), how do you receive notifications of new emails at Gmail?
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TAGS: Boxcar, boxcar-app, iPhone push notifications, push notifications