Waking your phone

A phone that is asleep cannot check its mailbox. Settings › Fetch new messages decides how that is handled, and the choice is yours.

The three choices

• Push. Our server asks Apple or Google to wake your phone the moment an envelope lands for it. The phone then checks its mailbox exactly as it would have anyway, and shows you the message itself. This is the fastest, and the timing of a wake now matches the timing of a message.
• Fetch. The phone is woken on a clock, whether or not anything is waiting, so the timing says nothing about any message. Under it, choose Every 15 Minutes, 30 Minutes or Hourly. This is what a new install uses, at 15 minutes.
• On Demand. Nothing is registered with Apple or Google at all. Mail arrives only while the app is open, and when you tap Check Now.

While the app is open

There is no second frequency to set. How often the app checks while you are looking at it follows the choice above: about once a minute for Push and for Fetch, and only when you ask for On Demand.

Quiet hours still apply. The background wake is one per phone, so the profiles vote and quiet hours win.

This profile

Turn on This profile at the top of Settings and one more row appears: This Profile: On Demand. That profile registers nothing with Apple or Google, whatever the phone as a whole is set to. A quiet profile cannot be made louder by the phone-wide choice.

What Apple and Google are told

A wake is content-free: no sender, no text, no profile, not even whether it is a message or ordinary housekeeping. They know the phone runs CHANNEL, and when it was woken. Our server holds one opaque id per profile against the phone's push token, and that id tells it nothing about you.

Choosing On Demand deletes the ids at our server straight away.

Contacts learn the id from your card when you pair. If you stop registering later, the next card they receive carries none, and they simply stop being able to wake you.

English is the reference text; any translation is a convenience. Help is stored on this phone and never contacts anyone.