Do yahoo mail and hotmail support IMAP IDLE?

Question

Cant seem to find this information anywhere - does anyone know if yahoo mail and hotmail support IMAP IDLE?

Answer 1

Having searched for "push email" +yahoo on Google, the second link in the results list affirms that Yahoo! Mail provides it (see this page also). Likewise, this page says that Hotmail is going to provide push mail support soon. It says:

Microsoft is planning to introduce Hotmail push email support for a wide range of phones including the iPhone, Windows Mobile devices and Android. Push email support will be introduced with Windows Live Wave 4 in June.

Answer 2

As @dfjacobs has mentioned in his comment, Push Email support and IMAP IDLE are not the same thing. IMAP's IDLE command is optional and not part of the original IMAP spec and not every mail server is required to implement it.

As far as I can tell, Yahoo's IMAP servers actually do not support the IDLE command. In my tests, when sending the IDLE command I receive a BAD response with the message:

[CLIENTBUG] IDLE Command is not a valid IMAP command

This seems to indicate that it is not possible. This does not rule out all methods of Push Email, but it does unfortunately appear to rule out IMAP IDLE which is one of the more common methods of accomplishing it.

EDIT: I also forgot to mention that Hotmail does not support IMAP so the IDLE command will definitely not work there.