Configuring push notifications

Mimestream supports system push notifications for new messages received in your Inbox, helping you stay on top of newly-received email.

đź’ˇ On Mac, Mimestream must be running to receive push notifications.

Enable macOS system notifications for Mimestream

For Mimestream to be able to show push notifications, access to the macOS system notifications infrastructure must be granted to the app. This access is requested during onboarding, but it can be revisited as follows:

  1. Open System Settings
  2. Click “Notifications”, select “Mimestream” from the list
  3. Ensure that notifications are enabled, and that the desired access is given. We recommend the default settings – the “Banners” style, as well as having the “Badge application icon” option enabled.

System Notifications

Configuring per-account settings

The types of messages that show push notifications can be configured on a per-account basis in Mimestream’s settings:

  1. Choose Mimestream from the top main menu
  2. Click on Settings… (or Preferences… on macOS 12), and choose the Accounts tab
  3. Select your account in the left pane
  4. Select the desired option for the Notifications setting: Primary Inbox (only shown if categorized inbox is enabled), Inbox, or None.

Technical details of push notifications

Mimestream’s push architecture prioritizes your privacy and security. In Mimestream 1.10 and later, Private Push is enabled by default on macOS 26 and later. Google’s Gmail API sends an event containing only your email address and an opaque history ID to the Mimestream Private Push service. The service forwards that event to Mimestream over a direct encrypted connection to push.mimestream.com; it never receives your Google OAuth credentials and cannot read your email or see message content. Mimestream then syncs the changes directly from Gmail.

On older macOS versions, Mimestream uses the IMAP IDLE extension (RFC 2177) to listen for new-message events directly from Gmail at imap.gmail.com on port 993. This legacy method does not work if a Google Workspace administrator has disabled IMAP access.

See Mimestream Private Push in our Trust Center for a detailed explanation of the architecture and its privacy properties.