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email notifications: iPhone/iCloud vs. Android/Gmail

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BostonCharlie
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email notifications: iPhone/iCloud vs. Android/Gmail

Post by BostonCharlie »

A couple vaccine providers in the area use emails to notify people when appointments are available. In the interest of getting my mother and my ex's father tickets, I signed up using both my Gmail and my iCloud accounts -- I have an old iPhone in addition to my Android phone, and they both sit on my home wi-fi (no data plan). I figured one phone might work better than the other.

I went through both phones trying to optimize the mail apps and their notification systems. They are set to notify me when an email arrives.

Twice now, when receiving one of these vaccine appointment mailings, the iPhone (with the iCloud address) notified me long before the Android phone (using my Gmail address). Is this a common experience?
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Re: email notifications: iPhone/iCloud vs. Android/Gmail

Post by MoT »

BostonCharlie wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 11:41 am A couple vaccine providers in the area use emails to notify people when appointments are available. In the interest of getting my mother and my ex's father tickets, I signed up using both my Gmail and my iCloud accounts -- I have an old iPhone in addition to my Android phone, and they both sit on my home wi-fi (no data plan). I figured one phone might work better than the other.

I went through both phones trying to optimize the mail apps and their notification systems. They are set to notify me when an email arrives.

Twice now, when receiving one of these vaccine appointment mailings, the iPhone (with the iCloud address) notified me long before the Android phone (using my Gmail address). Is this a common experience?
Is the Gmail address the same as your iCloud address?

On my iOS devices, the mail notification will sound a few seconds before my Android devices. I believe it has to do with the polling/push interval of the service and/or device. There isn't much that can be done at all about that.
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Re: email notifications: iPhone/iCloud vs. Android/Gmail

Post by BostonCharlie »

ManOnTime wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 12:27 pm
BostonCharlie wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 11:41 am A couple vaccine providers in the area use emails to notify people when appointments are available. In the interest of getting my mother and my ex's father tickets, I signed up using both my Gmail and my iCloud accounts -- I have an old iPhone in addition to my Android phone, and they both sit on my home wi-fi (no data plan). I figured one phone might work better than the other.

I went through both phones trying to optimize the mail apps and their notification systems. They are set to notify me when an email arrives.

Twice now, when receiving one of these vaccine appointment mailings, the iPhone (with the iCloud address) notified me long before the Android phone (using my Gmail address). Is this a common experience?
Is the Gmail address the same as your iCloud address?

On my iOS devices, the mail notification will sound a few seconds before my Android devices. I believe it has to do with the polling/push interval of the service and/or device. There isn't much that can be done at all about that.
They are different addresses: @icloud.com for iPhone and @gmail.com for Android.

Interested to hear that their notification times are comparable for you. In my case, it is an email list with tens of thousands of subscribers being processed, so that could explain it somehow. Maybe the surge is throttled by Gmail but not by iCloud, or maybe my iCloud address in in the first batch and my Gmail address in the last batch for some reason.
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Re: email notifications: iPhone/iCloud vs. Android/Gmail

Post by MoT »

BostonCharlie wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 12:52 pm
ManOnTime wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 12:27 pm
BostonCharlie wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 11:41 am A couple vaccine providers in the area use emails to notify people when appointments are available. In the interest of getting my mother and my ex's father tickets, I signed up using both my Gmail and my iCloud accounts -- I have an old iPhone in addition to my Android phone, and they both sit on my home wi-fi (no data plan). I figured one phone might work better than the other.

I went through both phones trying to optimize the mail apps and their notification systems. They are set to notify me when an email arrives.

Twice now, when receiving one of these vaccine appointment mailings, the iPhone (with the iCloud address) notified me long before the Android phone (using my Gmail address). Is this a common experience?
Is the Gmail address the same as your iCloud address?

On my iOS devices, the mail notification will sound a few seconds before my Android devices. I believe it has to do with the polling/push interval of the service and/or device. There isn't much that can be done at all about that.
They are different addresses: @icloud.com for iPhone and @gmail.com for Android.

Interested to hear that their notification times are comparable for you. In my case, it is an email list with tens of thousands of subscribers being processed, so that could explain it somehow. Maybe the surge is throttled by Gmail but not by iCloud, or maybe my iCloud address in in the first batch and my Gmail address in the last batch for some reason.

With different email addresses, being different spots on the "list" as their server is pushing out the emails would explain it.
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Re: email notifications: iPhone/iCloud vs. Android/Gmail

Post by BostonCharlie »

I timed it this time. My gmail/android email notification chimed over nine minutes after my icloud/iphone email notification. The sender is using Constant Contact, and their list now has over 115k subscribers (by their account).

Last time I was too frantic trying to sign up my ex-FIL to time it, but I recall looking at the clock when my android phone finally chimed and thinking it was ten minutes. That just seemed too incredible, so I set up this experiment. Both phones were plugged in to chargers. I set both devices this morning so each was running just its mail app before I turned off their screens.

Update to add that looking through the header for the gmail message, the timestamps suggest that Constant Contact delivered the message to the gmail server about 10 minutes after it was sent. The iclould message header doesn't have these detailed timestamps.
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