Slightly buried along with all of the suffocating iPhone hype, which is starting to make me go completely insane (although the fact that I have to cover ALL of it during tomorrow’s PreviewCast episode is what’s going to drive me totally bonkers), is a reminder to people to sign up for Yahoo! Mail because they’re the only one that’s going to offer “push” IMAP e-mail to iPhone customers. What this basically means that instead of relying on iPhone to periodically use the network/battery power to connect to the e-mail server to find out if there’s any new messages, Yahoo! will immediately send any new e-mails that come in straight through the internets to your iPhone, so that you’re iPhone doesn’t have to go check itself.

As an example:
Traditional Script
iPhone: “Oops, it’s been 15 minutes! I need to go on the network to check for new e-mails!”
Battery: “You’ll need some power to do that, here’s 0.5% of my life to help you along the way.”
iPhone: “Thanks, Battery. I need to stand in line for the network bandwidth, now…”
After going through the network…
Mail Server: “WHAT DO YOU WANT???”
iPhone: “Umm, any mail for me?”
Mail Server: “NO YOU IDIOT! GET OUTTA HERE!”

“Push” IMAP Script
Mail Server: “Oh, a new message just came in. Oh look, it’s for Douglas. Better kick that message right off to his iPhone.”
iPhone: “Hey, here’s a message that Yahoo! just pushed over to me. Thanks, Yahoo!”

Now this may be well and good, but I’ve still got a few beefs about Yahoo! Mail, and so I want to share three good reasons why I wouldn’t use it even if I had an iPhone, and then a few other beefs about iPhones compatibility with e-mail.

Reason 1: My username (aka my Yahoo! ID). Yahoo! is the only website that I’ve ever been to where both “webmacster87″ AND “fountainofapples” were taken before I got a chance to sign up! “webmacster87″ is very rarely already taken, and I’ve never been to a site where both that AND “fountainofapples” was taken. I don’t know who the idiots were that took my two trademarked usernames, but I had to get a Yahoo! ID, so I ended up doing “fountainofapples” spelled backwards. That’s right, I have a Yahoo! Mail address, and it’s selppafoniatnuof@yahoo.com (pronounced “sell-puh-phone-eee-at-new-of”). Do I check it? No! That’s simply there so I can get onto websites like Flickr and Upcoming, which require a Yahoo! ID. Do you think I’d really want to give that out as my e-mail address? People have a hard enough time spelling “webmacster87″!

Reason 2: I check my e-mail at many different times from many different computers in many different ways. This means that I rely on a clean, easy-to-use/understand webmail interface, and I personally don’t consider Yahoo! Mail to fall in this category. Gmail and .Mac Mail do/did a fairly good job in this department. Yahoo! Mail? Nope.

Reason 3: When I watched Steve Jobs’ keynote last January, he made a chart with examples of IMAP and POP3 servers. When he put Yahoo! Mail under the IMAP category, I could have sworn he was making a mistake. I have gone through Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Mail Help many times since then, and I haven’t seen anything about IMAP on Yahoo! Mail! I paid $107 last June for a year’s subscription to .Mac just so that I could have IMAP e-mail (I needed it at the time)! If Yahoo! Mail had free “push” IMAP e-mail for all accounts, than why wasn’t I using that? Well, it turns out that according to their website, they don’t offer ANY IMAP access at all, and I think you have to get some sort of upgrade for POP3. Apparently this “push” IMAP thing is only for the iPhone, and not for computers. If I’m wrong, then someone correct me, but I haven’t seen anything that says that this IMAP access is available anywhere except for the iPhone.

My last beef is why Yahoo! is the only service that is advertising this “push” IMAP thing. I did take the opportunity to praise it, it is a good thing. (I just don’t like the other aspects of Yahoo! Mail.) Why doesn’t Apple offer this “push” IMAP e-mail with ITS OWN $100 EAT-YOUR-WALLET RIP-OFF OF A SERVICE? My .Mac subscription just expired yesterday because that service isn’t worth a dollar of my money (except for maybe the Sync Services), and they haven’t added one single new feature in the year I’ve been there except for maybe a bunch of additional Podcast Jingles and a new Webmail interface, which is really not worth my $100/year. Apple: either lower the price of .Mac or add some new features. Or bring iTools back (for free). Better yet, lower the price AND add new features: people just can’t afford that kind of price tag.

As for Google Gmail (which I do proudly use): if Yahoo! can offer free “push” IMAP e-mail to the iPhone, then why can’t you? After all, you’re the one that ignited this idea that free e-mail should offer more than 20 MB (or whatever) of space when you launched Gmail in 2004. The only thing that has been lagging is that you only offer POP e-mail access. I’d really like to see either a “push” IMAP equivalent to what Yahoo! has, or else have them come up with a similar solution. I tried once not using Mac OS X Mail, and instead just using the Gmail interface, but I really need offline access to my e-mail: I need to be able to view it and read it when I don’t have an internet connection. I’d like Gmail to either implement IMAP (not just on the iPhone, but across the board), or give us some kind of local interface that allows us offline access to our e-mail. I’m hoping that the new Google Gears thing is promising in this direction.