Does Email app use more battery and memory?

[mboswell]

Does the pre-installed Email app that comes with Android use more battery or more memory/space on the phone? Do you think using the pre-installed Email app is better or should I download the app for my particular email service and use that instead? Thanks!

 

[Mustang02]

Personal preference and it depends on the functionality you need or want.

 

[Jonny Kansas]

It also makes a difference whether your email service uses POP3 or IMAP. If memory serves, one will push email to the phone from the server. The other requires the app to periodically poll the server to check for new email. When using the latter, you can set how frequently it checks. This will affect battery life somewhat, though in my opinion, email apps are the least of your worry for hogging battery.

As Mustang said, functionality plays a large roll in many people's opinions as well. For my needs, the stock gmail and email apps serve my purposes just fine.

 

[leeshor]

Allow me to go a step further. The issue with IMAP, (It can run in the background or on demand) is that it syncs everything in both directions which would certainly cause it to take somewhat longer to do than simply pulling mail using POP. IMAP will also consume more data. Battery and data usage is dependent on the volume of mail and in the case of IMAP in particular the total amount of messages/attachments stored on the phone.

 

[Jonny Kansas]

Thanks Lee! We don't even host our own mail server here at work, so I'm trying to remember the short time we breezed over that stuff in school.