iPhone notifications – two services that create notifications for email

In the past week or so I’ve come across two different services that create iPhone notifications upon email receipt. One here:

macosxhints.com - Push any email to the iPhone via third-party app

There have been several hints in the past, including these two of mine, with regards to using push email on the iPhone, or using MobileMe with custom reply-to entries, etc. A new application called PushMail ($5; App Store link) seems to me to be the ideal way of using push email (or any mail) on the iPhone…

… Essentially, PushMail gives you your own new email address, something like a@dopushmail.com. Everything that gets sent to that address has a push notification displayed on your phone. The notification displays the sender, the subject, and as much of the email as can fit in a notification. So, you can configure your regular email addresses to all forward a copy of your email to that new address, and you will have your email pushed to you.

This is an option in the settings for most webmail email services such as Gmail, or you can configure procmail to forward a copy, if you've got control of your email server. ..

..You can to the same for free using text free lite - lookup in appstore textfree, they will give you a push enabled smth@textfree.us address, then just forward to that address…

and another:

TUAW: Apple approved Gmail app for iPhone. Has hell frozen over?

TechCrunch is reporting today that an iPhone App that utilizes the Apple Push Notification system to let you know you have new Gmail is about to hit the app store. The app, called GPush, is developed by Tiverias Apps, and gives Gmail users an instant notification that new mail has arrived. iPhone users will still have to read their mail, either in a browser or the Apple Mail client, but the notifications will be essentially instant.

GPush will be US$0.99 for a week, then will be sold for $1.99 after.

The Tiverias sight has more on GPush including an FAQ. It does work with Google Apps.

That means I could create an email account on one of our family Google Apps domains just for push email. Then I could use that whenever I have something I want to be notified of, like an email notification related to a Google Calendar event. Using an account like this has a very important advantage – the way GPush works their server has to hold your account un/pw:

Should I be concerned about providing my password to GPush?

When we created the app, we committed first and foremost to security. We are using multiple levels of encryption including SSL and obfuscation. We had a penetration testing team run their analysis on the server and passed their certification.

Briefly, HELL YES you should be concerned. My Gmail credentials are among the most valuable “things” I own. Steal my car please – at least that’s insured! (It’s also very crummy.) I’m not giving the keys to the empire to any vendor. A purpose build Google Apps account though – that I could do.

I’ll provide an update on how well this works.