push notifications on thunderbird android

[erobin]

I would love to see push notifications on the Android app.

In other words I would get a notification when an email comes in rather then waiting for it to sync.  This may be the thing that stops me from moving over.

[Jon]

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[ThePillenwerfer]

If you click the three horizontal lines at the top left of the inbox and then "Manage Folders" followed by a folder, ie Inbox, you can enable push for it.

Have you done that and found it doesn't work?

I installed it but haven't done anything with it as there's no proper settings yet and it seems no better than K-9 mail, apart from not having the horrible pink tone.

[erobin]

@ThePillenwerferThank you for the info!  With your instructions I was able to find the setting; but it didn't work.  In fact it somehow broke notifications on my current email client.

In general though I think the setting needs to be easier to find and actually work.

It's really a bummer I'm a big fan of Mozilla and Firefox and I really want to give Thunderbird a chance to be my default email client on android.

[ThePillenwerfer]

K-9 is my current Android client, not because I like it but because it is about the only one I can find that will work with OAuth2 and run on Android 5, so that may be why the two co-operated for me but it clashed with your existing one.

K-9's settings are very difficult to fathom and sadly there's no indication that Mozilla will improve them and get it to the standard of computer Thunderbird.

[erobin]

Update: I have found that there are settings (they are a bit buried but at least they are there) for "push".  BUT it doesn't work very well...I am using Thunderbird in conjunction with Edison email for comparison.  Edison will notify of a new email almost immediately, but despite being set to push Thunderbird will notify anywhere from immediately to almost 10 minutes later.

The feature definitely still needs some work.

[comicius]

For me it isn't working too. I enabled notifications and also push, but I don't get a notification that an email was coming in.

Also, some users say that there is a message "searching for email". But that I also don't have.

[kiersche]

I think there's a mismatch in the interpretations of the term 'push'. What you're getting at, and what I would love to see as well, is Thunderbird for Android basically notifying me of a new message as soon as my email provider receives it. The setting in the current version, though, is basically just for the mechanism on a phone called 'push notification'. You can set the interval in which Thunderbird will check for new messages, and when TB does that and finds new messages, it will then give you a 'push notification'. That's what that setting is for.

I guess in TB4Android speak, we'd need a setting that allows the app to check for new message like once every minute or every 30 seconds. Even more awesome would be seperate settings for when you're not connected to Wifi for saving data.

I'm sure they have this feature in their backlog somewhere and I'm betting that this will arrive in the next months. I trust that they know what we need from a good email app, and judging by how gorgeous they made this one, they want this app to be good 🙂

[kiersche]

Once my previous message gets approved: I stand corrected. There are actually two 'push' settings and I didn't know that. Sorry for any confusion that I caused ^^.

[frydac]

I was also looking for this functionality, and found this issue first, later I found the help page that seems to indicate what I wanted: thunderbird gets emails immediately 'pushed' from the mail provider as soon as they arrive without having to wait for the poll interval to end, the help page:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/configure-push-email-thunderbird-android

done one test, and that worked.

[frydac]

FYI: here is the help page explaining how to enable push email, as in Thunderbird gets the mail pushed from the server when it arrives, in stead of Thunderbird pulling the information on regular intervals.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/configure-push-email-thunderbird-android

For my simple test usecase it seems to work as expected.

I got to this issue first before I found the help page, so I hope posting it here might be helpful for someone.

[erobin]

@frydacI've already tried that, and it worked intermittently at best for me.  So as far as I'm concerned push notifications still don't properly work.

To be clear I've tried the instructions in the support page multiple times and have got it to work sometimes but it's by no means consistent.