If you are moving from the blackberry to the iPhone, or just a new iPhone user, you may be disappointed to know that the only real mail notification for the iPhone is the ‘ding’ that you here whenever it comes in. Whereas on the blackberry you get a small flashing light on the top of your phone, and in some models you can customize the color based on the person that sent the email.

You would expect on the iPhone at least a popup notification, so you don’t have to unlock your phone and check the unread mail count every time you want to know if there is a new email or not. But that is exactly what you have to do unless you would like to pay for a third party app that does send you a push notification. In addition all of the apps I have looked into do not support exchange email. Although there may be some that I am unaware of that do this.

I have found a free alternative. alt text

Download a free app called Notifio iTunes link. Then sign up for their free service here. Notifio is basically a platform that send you notifications via several services you can sign up for through there site. You can get things like twitter notifications, etc. However, the part that I am interested in, is a feature that lets you send an email to an address that they give you. Whenever an email is received at that address you get a push notification on your phone with the subject of the email.

So all you have to do at this point is forward all of your email accounts that you want notifications for to that address and wait for a notification on your phone. The time this takes is generally between instantaneous and 2 seconds.

There is one caveat in that if you emails contain sensitive or confidential information you are forwarding them to a 3rd party that you do not have control over.