Anyone?

I believe the terms push and pull first started to be used (re online/internet activities) with regard to email. "Push" meant the email was "pushed" into your inbox, "pull" meant you had to click on something to give a command to download or retrieve any new messages.

This concept gradually expanded to a whole range of internet activities, including of course email, but also weather information, news updates etc.

I still see somethings listed as "push notifications," but these days it's probably more accurate to view all notifications as "push."

Because if you agree to receive notifications on your phone, for example, they will be "pushed" to the lock screen, the home screen, or banner.

I'm on my laptop right now, and I just heard a chime bc an email came in. That's push.

Does this answer your question?

Yes. Thank you!

Not sure of the context of your question, Daniel, but push notifications can be a problem. Lots of hackers / phishers will use push notifications to send you things like "your car insurance is about to expire! click here to renew!" sorts of things. Then they ask you for bank cards, social security numbers, yada yada yada.

Never respond to a push notification's request to click and enter data, unless you totally trust the request. A good way to check is to hover over the "from" field in your email. Most of the time it will pop up with the actual email that this was sent from (though this can be faked, too).

People will get really clever with these emails, all to make you think it's real. For example, you might get something from (I don't know if this is real): irs dot gov (which might be real) or irs dot com (which is fake, because pretty much all USA government emails end with 'gov'.

Bottom line, if you don't know the sender, it's not good practice to click on any links in the email. And a friendly reminder that companies like banks, government agencies, CPAs, etc., will never ask you to give any remotely sensitive information over email.

IRS does not use email, and they don't use the phone either. Neither does Social Security. Everything is done by mail, so if you get a push notification from either one it's a scam.

NIna, good points all around. I wasn't really thinking of that.

But yes, push notifications can be used for scams and phishing just the way email can.