iPhone: getting IMAP push notifications with Python and Prowl

I’m a happy iPhone user. I was lucky to get the first iPhone soon after it was available and I just bought a new iPhone4. This is my first time having unlimited data plan on a mobile phone 🙂 so first thing I did was to configure my email accounts, both personal and work.

It felt weird to configure a GMail account as Microsoft Exchange in order to sync contacts and get push notifications, but that did the trick. For my work email account, I didn’t have push notifications, and polling is not any cool. I know very little about email itself, but I found that in order to have push email you need an IMAP IDLE compatible server and client.

As you may see below, the server does support IMAP IDLE:

[gist]https://gist.github.com/579679[/gist]

but it looks like iPhone Mail app doesn’t 🙁

I started looking around and finally found the solution: use an application called Prowl (2.39€) which will push whatever notification it gets through a REST API. The idea is basically to create a console IMAP IDLE client and use the Prowl API to send a new notification. Sounds like fun!

There is a Perl implementation here (http://github.com/mschmitt/GhettoPush/) but I don’t like Perl very much, so I had to do it in Python, of course 😉

I also found some other Python implementations which I didn’t like for one reason or another so I coded a new one using imaplib2 by Piers Lauder (http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~piers/python/imaplib.html) and prowlpy, which I forked on GitHub and did a couple of really silly modifications (http://github.com/saghul/prowlpy).