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Comment by dbg31415 | Hacker News Reader

So a few years back, everything was super fast on IMAP on my phone. But now it just crawls. On the Gmail App it's still pretty fast. So I just assumed it was slow because Google was being a dick and trying to get people to use their app instead of Apple Mail or Outlook. Is the protocol slow, or is Google throttling it?

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I don't know about throttling, but later Android versions are known to mess with email notifications.

See: https://github.com/k9mail/k-9/issues/3950

IMAP is fine. It's likely your email provider's fault.

Having just this month implemented an IMAP client I can tell you it's blazingly fast for Gmail & Outlook.

It's actually much faster and more efficient than using the Gmail API.

I just clocked it at 16 seconds to check for new mail in Apple Mail checking against a Gmail Account on an iPhone SE connected to Google Fiber. It feels pretty slow...

Meanwhile, same update vs same account in Outlook took about 6 seconds.

And in the Gmail App, about 4 seconds.

Not super scientific, just me looking at my watch and opening each app and seeing how long it took to update.

So maybe something with Apple Mail?

The slow part is opening the IMAP connection and authenticating, after that it's fast.

I guess it might depend on how these clients are maintaining their connections.

Wondering if it could be your isp prioritization being lower because of the not http(s) port.

Well, IMAP works fine, so it's not the protocol.

Gmail has its own sync engine.

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