GMail VIP Push Notifications in iOS

There is still no way to do a selective (VIP) push notifications for GMail. To get VIP notifications, you need to have Mail App checking your mailbox regularly, which uses a lot of battery juice.

ifttt-gmail

I already wrote on the subject. The notifications were mostly there, but living with myMail was not pleasant. The regular iOS Mail app is better integrated and sports much nicer user interface. Long story short, I dumped myMail.

Now I run notifications from IFTTT (for “if this then that”) – an interesting service that alerts you when some condition is satisfied. There is 164 notification channels at the moment, an one of them is GMail. For notifications, there is an iOS Push, courtesy of IFTTT App.

So, to set up VIP push notifications:

  1. In Gmail, visit Settings -> Filters, create a new filter
  2. Put conditions to select important e-mail. Useful condition is has:circle in “has” field – this includes all people you follow in Google+
  3. Check “Apply a label” and select existing or create a new label, for example VIP
  4. Create an account with IFTTT and enable GMail channel
  5. Now install IFTTT App and enable iOS notification channel
  6. Create an IFTTT recipe to send you a push notification when e-mail arrives to a VIP folder

It usually takes about 5 minutes for IFTTT to realize the e-mail is there.

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