Instant Push

Blix intelligently pushes your emails so they arrive on your device almost instantly, saving you valuable time. Because Blix makes configuring your accounts so simple, receiving your email has never been faster or more intuitive. We believe we have come up with the best possible solution to this challenge, in terms of both user experience and data safety, on every platform — mobile and desktop alike.

Instant Push architecture

Blix uses state-of-the-art technologies to keep the security and privacy of our users a top priority. We strongly believe that users own their information: we do not sell our users’ data and never did, and we do not store their emails. Our unique technological architecture allows us to deliver a safer solution, one that provides industry-leading email and calendar services for you and your organization.

We invest heavily in building the best email solution while maintaining a service with a great user experience, with a special emphasis on privacy, reliability, efficiency, and security. These are among the main reasons why professionals prefer Blix over other solutions.

Blix for Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux connects directly to your email provider. We believe that this is the right approach for keeping your email data secure, because emails travel directly between Blix and your email provider. Building Blix to work this way took a unique architectural approach and made the app significantly more complex to implement, but we are convinced it is the right way to provide an excellent service while protecting your privacy.

There are two cases in which we offer an optional secure push proxy that acts as a pipe between the email server and the Blix app. The first is for Apple iOS devices, and the second is for Android devices running the Yahoo Mail service, which does not provide IMAP IDLE or an equivalent technique.

Apple iOS devices limit an app’s background connectivity in order to reduce battery consumption. While that helps improve battery life, it also prevents Blix for iOS from holding a persistent, direct connection between your device and your email server — unlike Android, which allows it.

Since it is not possible to keep a direct connection open on your iOS device, Blix enhances the experience by delivering instant push notifications as soon as a new email arrives in your server mailbox. Delivering that notification requires a persistent connection, which our push proxy provides. If you prefer, you may select another sync mode (Fetch or Manual) that never uses the push proxy at all.

The push proxy is a secure service that delivers notifications from your email provider (such as Gmail or Exchange) to the platform-specific push service on your device. The Blix push proxy receives email headers from the server and, within 1–2 seconds, pushes them to that service, after which they are automatically and completely deleted. Push emails are not stored.

The push proxy has a single purpose: to enhance the email experience and deliver instant notifications to your device when a direct connection from the app is not feasible. We do not, at any time, use the information for any other purpose.

The Blix app on the device itself uses OAuth 2.0 where applicable and has no access to your account password. Instead, it uses a token provided by the email provider to connect to the email server.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to get in touch with our team to learn more about Blix’s highly secure solution.