What is data usage for email sync set to "as items arrive"?

[nohra]

I'm on AT&T, so I don't have Data Sense :angry:. Can someone who has Data Sense give me some idea of what data usage is with an email account set to sync "as items arrive". Specifically, it would a live.com account. Or if anyone knows in general how much more data is used with that verses using the 15 minute option. Any information along those lines would be helpful! I'd love to set email to update as things arrive, but don't want to run into any data usage surprises halfway through a cycle and AT&T's data usage information by text can be stale as long as 24 hours!

thanks again WP community!

 

[Jack Janik]

I'm not sure how much, but just think of it this way: your phone is constantly checking with outlook if there is a new email. So it takes a significant (more) amount of data. Emails are a few kilobytes though, so I can't imagine it would be too much.

 

[foxbat121]

That is incorrect. Push email doesn't constantly check inboxes. That's what polling does. Push establish a connection to the push server. Maintaining the connection doesn't use much data. When mail server have new stuff to sync, it will then notify your phone to sync them. Otherwise, not much data flow through other than the keep alive ping packs.

On the other hand, if you use timed interval polling, you will need to check the inbox of your mail box at pre-configured interval to see if there is any new mail. Each poll will consume certain amount of data as your phone needs to login, issue query, sync then log out every time.

The amount of data used in each scenario largely depends on how often you get new emails. Let's say, if you only get new emails once an hour, you will use one trip to your mail server to sync when you use push email. However, if you setup to poll mail server everything 15 minutes, you will use four trips to your mail server to sync only one mail. 3 of the trip data is wasted because there is no new email. On the other hand, if you constantly get new emails, push email will use more data because the phone get notified everytime a new email arrives.

Emails won't be a big data consumer either way. You can limit what you want to download (head only, head + body but no attachment or everything). On the other hand, using a mobile browser will use a lot more data than emails. Stream audio or video are obviously the number one data killer.

 

[nohra]

Wow, great information! Thanks!! Looking at the push/polling difference does make a lot of difference because I do currently have an email addy that i have set to sync every 15 but i probably get 2 emails a day to it. Overall, not a big data drain of course, but no need wasting it, especially at the end of the data cycle when MBs are crucial ;-) The new account will get more volume but not at regular times and i wanted to see the emails as they come.

Thanks again for the info!

 

[hopmedic]

Additionally, no one but you can give a realistic answer, as it depends on how much mail you get, and what size the content of that mail is.