Comment 32 for bug 332355

Sorry, I meant to say "Incorporating this feature into Empathy" as opposed to "Evolution" in the comment above.

Google Talk does indeed have a documented extension to the XMPP protocol, which allows clients to "subscribe" to push notifications for new emails. The fact that these notifications are "pushed" relieves the client of the need to poll the server on a set interval and makes them (theoretically) almost instant.

Support for this feature is surely worth considering, even if it is only Google Talk that currently offers it. It would be particularly useful for the many people who choose not to use Evolution to read their mail but still require notifications.

The feature is documented at: http://code.google.com/apis/talk/jep_extensions/gmail.html