App For WP8

[richtrj]

Does anybody know when will be app for Windows Phone 8 available? When I use mobile browser, there are some bugs - something wrong with checkboxes in message list for example. I found article ( http://blog.fastmail.fm/2013/10/21/f...web-interface/ ) - they have promised "soon". But since no mention.

[misc]

Hi richtrj,

as far as I know there aren't any plans for a native WP app. The artice you are referring to is about the mobile interface and that's online for quite a while now.

Greetings,
Michael

[randian]

Originally Posted by misc

as far as I know there aren't any plans for a native WP app. The artice you are referring to is about the mobile interface and that's online for quite a while now.

Fastmail reps did mention an app here, but I presumed they were talking about iOS and/or Android, not WP.

[richtrj]

Originally Posted by randian

Fastmail reps did mention an app here, but I presumed they were talking about iOS and/or Android, not WP.

The article is clear - web interface for WP coming soon. When I use web interface on my Lumia 920, I see some different app than on the video. See

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resi...t=photo%2c.png

I'm new in FM and I suppose, it's some old mobile interface... Unfortunately, it's not very functional (missing checkoboxes, strange formatting etc..).

[DrStrabismus]

It says "If your phone supports it (iOS 6+, Android 4+, Windows Phone coming soon), you’ll automatically get the new interface.", so it's clearly not an app.

[robn]

The post is talking about the mobile app. Its only currently available on iOS and Android. WP will get the "classic" mobile interface, which is what that screenshot shows. I'm not sure of the current status of the new mobile app for WP; I'll check with neilj.

A native app is currently in planning. At this stage its highly unlikely that it will be available for anything other than iOS and Android.

[randian]

Originally Posted by robn

A native app is currently in planning. At this stage its highly unlikely that it will be available for anything other than iOS and Android.

Will it support push email on iOS? Without EAS and IMAP IDLE (or, since I don't recall you mentioning support for it, IMAP NOTIFY) I'm not sure what's left. iCloud has a push scheme that iOS obviously permits, but I don't know if Apple will let anybody else use it.

[robn]

Originally Posted by randian

Will it support push email on iOS? Without EAS and IMAP IDLE (or, since I don't recall you mentioning support for it, IMAP NOTIFY) I'm not sure what's left. iCloud has a push scheme that iOS obviously permits, but I don't know if Apple will let anybody else use it.

As I said, we're in early planning, but the intent is that it will support push notifications (most of the reason we're doing this). It won't be an IMAP client, so won't support IDLE or NOTIFY (not that anything supports NOTIFY anyway).

Last time we checked, Apple's push channel is available to third parties but doesn't allow high-frequency notifications, but exceptions have been made for some apps (eg Yahoo!'s mail app). We're still considering our options here.

Don't expect to hear much about this before the second half of the year at the earliest. Our focus is on calendar and contacts right now.

[EricG]

I constantly see threads were people have problems with webmail on phones. Why do people do this? The standard mail app supports fastmail with IMAP. It may not be as powerful, but for simple things it is much easier to use.

[danieldk]

Originally Posted by EricG

I constantly see threads were people have problems with webmail on phones. Why do people do this? The standard mail app supports fastmail with IMAP. It may not be as powerful, but for simple things it is much easier to use.

Because the standard IMAP client on Android is miserable? No support for conversations, slow, no IMAP IDLE support, apparently no support for server-side searches, etc. I tried K-9 Mail, AquaMail and Kaiten, I found them to be buggy and not well-designed. While on the other hand the webmail client works quite well on Android. Google clearly wants to push GMail, because the GMail app is great.

iOS is a different story. Since iCloud uses nearly off-the-shelf IMAP (without IDLE, but another channel for push notifications), the iOS mail client works well with other IMAP services as well. It's also quite nicely designed.

[WormholeLawyer]

Originally Posted by robn

As I said, we're in early planning, but the intent is that it will support push notifications (most of the reason we're doing this). It won't be an IMAP client, so won't support IDLE or NOTIFY (not that anything supports NOTIFY anyway).

Last time we checked, Apple's push channel is available to third parties but doesn't allow high-frequency notifications, but exceptions have been made for some apps (eg Yahoo!'s mail app). We're still considering our options here.

Don't expect to hear much about this before the second half of the year at the earliest. Our focus is on calendar and contacts right now.

EAS may be a good option. It works on iPhone, works on Android, works on Windows Phone. Plus, with IMAP IDLE supported by FM we could literally have "push" on every operating system, PC, and mobile device in one go.

(edit) then again I remember reading a thread stating FM wasn't a huge fan of EAS. I understand why, too. Given that it would require an extra fee I believe and may have other technical limitations. I do wish IMAP NOTIFY was supported by iOS!

[randian]

I don't think any email client supports IMAP NOTIFY. None of the major ones, certainly. That's part of the problem. I believe it superior to EAS, but if nobody is going to bother implementing it (or perhaps even know about it) there's no point.

There was a plan to put NOTIFY support in Cyrus 2.6, but I don't know if it's on track or not. Dovecot 2.2 has NOTIFY support, but I don't know if any of the providers using Dovecot (Polarismail, EuMX, others) have it turned on.

There already exists an out of band notification mechanism in Cyrus 2.5 called "Message store events notification". I don't know if that's the mechanism Fastmail intends to use with its mobile application.

[robn]

Originally Posted by WormholeLawyer

EAS may be a good option. It works on iPhone, works on Android, works on Windows Phone. Plus, with IMAP IDLE supported by FM we could literally have "push" on every operating system, PC, and mobile device in one go.

(edit) then again I remember reading a thread stating FM wasn't a huge fan of EAS. I understand why, too. Given that it would require an extra fee I believe and may have other technical limitations. I do wish IMAP NOTIFY was supported by iOS!

EAS is not in our planning anywhere. I think it highly unlikely that it will ever happen. Email sync is only a part of EAS, and we have no desire to implement it just for notifications - IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV are all perfectly capable protocols for data synchronisation and have the advantage of being open standards unencumbered by patents. From a technical perspective, EAS is not where we want to be.

Regarding cost, I'll repeat what I've said elsewhere. A few people might be willing to pay extra for EAS support, but right now that doesn't seem to be anywhere near enough to cover the not-insignificant cost of development and ongoing maintenance.

The single pain point in open protocols right now appears to be new message notifications. IMAP IDLE is actually good for many situations (I use it all day with K-9 mail on my Android device). It has known problems, which IMAP NOTIFY goes some way to solve, but still doesn't quite get there (the need for a long-lived TCP connection is the biggest problem for mobile devices). As noted, it has the added deficiency of having no client implementations and perhaps only one server implementations (exclude niche and experimental software of course; I can't know about all of them!)

Message Store Events (RFC 5423) was mentioned. We do use this internally at FastMail. Every time something happens to your mail store in Cyrus, it emits an event, which we pick up and process. If you have a connected web client, then we push a slightly-modified version of that event to your client (using the EventSource mechanism). Its how the live updates work. It wouldn't be hard to open up a form of this to clients but there's no standardisation for transport and authentication so anything we did would be FastMail specific. I haven't heard of any clients even expressing interesting in support for this, let alone implementing it. A shame really.

The current plan for our mobile app is that it will use the same API that our web client uses. Parts of this API are published at http://jmap.io/, and we're working to release more of it and try and get other mail providers involved. Currently the spec doesn't include the notification parts, though we very much intend to release that documentation (there's no particular impediment, it just takes time). The nice thing about everything in JMAP is that its all stateless and asynchronous so it works really nicely on crappy networks and low-powered devices.

Finally, there's platform notification mechanisms on mobile devices. These present another challenge, because they work by pushing the event to eg Google or Apple services, which then push it to your device. Those services impose rate limits which (especially for iOS) make live notifications difficult - if the application is backgrounded its severely restricted on what it can do, so it relies on notifications from the push service, but those don't come in very often, so its all painful. We're still investigating options here.

Fortunately as more and more applications make it to mobile devices there's increased interest in efficient realtime updates. Google for example are currently experimenting ways to make more of the Android platform notification system available directly to Chrome for web applications to exploit. The situation will improve in time, but until it does we just have to accept that there's no easy answer and try to find a way to make something work with the tools we have available.