[jacoblambda]

But what is your email client using for notifications?

If it's using intermittent/timed fetch, that runs into the latency problem (taking longer to receive notifications). Push notifications exist to solve that problem.

If it's using IMAP's IDLE, MAPI's push, or JMAP's push, that's just another long-running HTTP or websocket connection.

And this protocol (along with the proprietary push notif aggregation services it is aiming to replace) exists to deduplicate those many long-running connections into a single connection out to some hardwired server that manages the many services/connections for it.

[colesantiago]

> But what is your email client using for notifications?

Local notifications?

I don't see the problem here with email, it seems to work well that it is great for my use case.

When you're offline with push notifications only the latest notification gets sent, not the previous notifications. This seems by design for notifications.

At least with E-mail I can see a history of emails that was sent to me.

I just see push notifications as a flawed concept that doesn't make sense for decentralised services.

[jraph]

I don't know what you mean by local notifications, but if you get a notification when a mail arrives, it's most probably because your mail client uses Google or Apple's push service if you use a regular mobile device, or if you installed and configured microG.

And here's your issue: your app that has nothing to do with Google relies on a centralised Google service, and depends on a proprietary library that speaks to some proprietary code running on your device.

Alternatively, your app isn't doing this, but then it risks being unreliable and stop notifying you if the system kills your app because it's been inactive for some time to save battery, or to reclaim memory, and/or it uses more battery than it could.

This post is not about a way to have more notifications: it is an answer to these issues.

[jacoblambda]

I think you are thinking about something different. So "Push Notifications" can refer to two different things.

The user oriented term refers to on-device notifications that pop up at the top of the screen. Those are technically just normal notifications but people like to call them push notifications for various reasons.

Push notifications in the technical sense however refer to a system for remote services to notify a client that something happened rather than the client manually polling the server for new updates. It's the difference between the client asking "do you have anything new" and the server telling the client "hey pay attention you have something new". This is what we are talking about when we say push notifications.

Email clients that automatically get new emails in the background all either do so using fetch polling or push notifications. The traditional method is fetch polling at a regular interval but nowadays most email clients support push notifications. We are discussing a tool that these clients can use behind the scenes to provide these push notifications for the email client in a battery and data efficient manner.

[ianburrell]

Push notifications work with any app. It is nicer to group notifications by app, and have app specific behavior. Emails add an extra step to get to the content in the app.

Gmail does push notifications. Otherwise, have to wait for the client to poll the server.