Ah a subject close to my heart ;-) ...  push notification of mail on the iPhone is real nice and definitely possible. 

However comes with a fair few ifs and buts, so let me provide some info an overview of the technology and the solutions. Technically all push notification is keeping a tcp channel open - very much like http long polling etc - and allowing the phone to receive instant notification of "anything" - but comes at a cost to battery life (not much in my experience). 

Out of the box the iPhone does not support push notifications on IMAP (or POP) accounts as it does not support IMAP idle. This is just the way it is and the way Apple implemented email on the iPhone (supposedly for "battery life"). I do not see them changing this in the near future. 

Apple does allow developers to make use of their central push notification service. This requires specialised apple approved serverside code for integrating with their servers. This has led to a variety of apps and services that poll your email account or that you need to forward your email to, which will then notify you via the Apple Push Notification service. This ends up sending you various forms of notification (sound / badge / popup alert) and will have you end up in the app in question and is a pretty good short term solution - but users need to buy the app etc.

Lastly if the mail server supports ActiveSync, push notification is supported through this in addition to the apple push notification mechanism. This is the most nicely integrated with the apple mail client, but currently not supported by surgemail. We are continuing to look into this but both the microsoft licensing costs of this proprietory protocol and required development effort has had us putting our development effort in places where we feel there is more benefit to our customers.

Text messages is the other solution you may well be able to employ yes. There are email to sms gateway providers out there that allow you to automatically forward your important emails to or use the user..cgi notify mechanism for forward notifications to which will get sent via sms. But again this would not be very integrated to your mail client.

Having said that, I've actually been doing quite a lot of development around this greater subject recently. Can't say too much yet as things are still in a state of flux, but notably an iPhone / iPad  inbox monitoring / messaging app with push notification of new mail, where I am attempting to integrate many of the nice features of a mail client (in particular surgeweb) with some of the more dBabble like messaging client features. Anyway... am on the home stretch for a 1.0 release to the app store now so watch this space over the coming weeks / months...

Hope that explains possibilities, and feel free to get back to me if you have any further questions getting the suggestions above working :-)

Marijn

On Wednesday 19/01/2011 at 12:35 am, Tom Cross wrote:

Hi
Does anyone have any ideas how to?

Tom Cross
Partner (Synergist)
HTMLnet
61 2 9288 9488
0418 295 336 brHIDDEN@tml.com.au