March 23, 2009
Setting up your iPhone to retrieve emails every 15 seconds or so!
This is a fantastic hack if you own one of the jailbroken iPhones. I found it over here and after reading through the document and comments it was quite easy to get my iPhone 2G (Firmware 2.1) to check emails every 15 seconds (or so, you can set any number of seconds).
To accomplish this you must download two utilities from here:
iPhoneBrowser - Windows based GUI for manipulating files on the iPhone
plist Editor for Window - Windows based GUI to edit plist files on the iPhone
Once both these programs are installed, you need to launch iPhoneBrowser and locate a file called com.apple.persistentconnection.plist in this directory /var/mobile/Library/Preferences. Just play around with the tree structure to the left within iPhoneBrowser.
Right click com.apple.persistentconnection.plist and select Save As… and save the file on your computer’s drive. Once done, run plist Editor for Windows and Open this file. You have to locate and change the numerical value of 900 (which is in seconds) to whatever you like. I’ve set mine to 15 at the moment, thereby instructing my iPhone to check emails every 15 seconds.
Save your file after editing and right click com.apple.persistentconnection.plist in the iPhoneBrowser window. Choose Replace File… and select the modified version of the file from your computer’s drive. Once done, simply close both applications, restart your iPhone and run the mail app.
You’ll notice that the iPhone will now fetch your emails every 15 seconds as opposed to the default 900 second setting that was setup in the com.apple.persistentconnection.plist file.
This is as close as it gets to having your iPhone access your email accounts every 15 seconds or so and to enjoy ‘near push’. This setting checks all email accounts as well so you don’t need to do any special settings. One important warning is that you shouldn’t go to Settings > Fetch New Data and make changes since your modification will be replaced. Though I’ve not tested this at all.
There you go, this is the closest that we get to having our iPhone buzz with lightening every email, every 15 seconds!
Go hack it.
PS: If you have your email hosted on MS Exchange Server and enjoy push technology on your iPhones, we envy you for the push of it … (not MS Exchange)!
