Quote:
Originally Posted by TenFour
I've been an Android phone user, so please excuse the basic question that I haven't found a clear answer on. If you use Fastmail as your email provider along with iPhones and Macs can you send and receive your domain email using the native Apple apps, and will everything work properly?
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Actually, if your'e using the Apple apps, things will work
better with Fastmail than with most other email services.
A few years ago, Fastmail put in the work with Apple to build in support for native push notification services on iOS Mail. AFAIK, this is something that no other email provider offers to the same level as Fastmail.
Even iCloud and Yahoo (which was the original recommended third-party email service for the iPhone back in the day), only support push for
new messages. This means that if you read, move, delete, or flag a message from another device, it won't get updated on your iPhone until you manually refresh.
With Fastmail, however,
all mailbox changes are pushed to all of your iOS devices. So if your Mail app on your iPhone is showing a red "5" badge because you have five unread messages, and you read those anywhere else — on your Mac, your iPad, or even in the Fastmail web interface — that count will update almost immediately. It's really quite magical.
In fact, Fastmail has taken it a step further to allow other folders to be pushed as well —*not just the Inbox. You have to either set these as favourites in the iOS Mail app or select them under your Fastmail account in
Settings->Mail->Accounts->Fetch New Data, but once enabled, any changes in those mailboxes will also be immediately pushed to your device.
Note that all of this only applies to the iOS Mail app. Apple Mail on the Mac simply uses the more standard IMAP IDLE, which works with just about any IMAP mail provider, but that feature is a killer on battery life, since it requires a persistent connection to the IMAP server, so it's not used on the iPhone and iPad.
While there are third-party iPhone mail apps that also provide push notifications, these don't use IMAP IDLE either; instead they rely on an intermediate server to log into your Fastmail account, and then push the notifications out from the third-party developer's server. This is how Microsoft Outlook, Airmail, Spark, and a host of others provide their own real-time push notifications with just about any mail server. However, that also means you're basically giving that other company access to your Fastmail account so it can check for new mail on your behalf.