[SM05]

Hey all,

Been using Nexus One for a couple of months now. Like it overall but rather general email app still bugs me, this issue in particular:

Email is retrieved on my phone and sits in phone's Inbox. I use default setting where email is not deleted off the server. I boot my home computer, check email, it retrieves it and as you'd expect removes it from the server. I check my phone's email Inbox and the previously retrieved email is gone now.

On wife's iPhone and on my older BB it never worked that way. This bugs the hack out of me. The only work around I found is to delete the message on the phone so that it goes to Trash. Then it's not automatically removed like I described earlier.

If anybody has suggestions on better workaround I'd appreciate it.

And don't get me started on lack of signature support. I know there is K9 alternative but the last I checked it had issues as well and just didn't seem as polished as the stock app.

Hoping Android 2.2 or 3.0 would improve on email app.

[reybie]

Strange, almost seems like your mail client in the PC is configured to remove the email from the server once it retrieves it which makes sense that the phone will synchronize your mailbox contents by removing the previously downloaded email. I believe this is normal behavior for POP mail, if you can set it up as IMAP then you might get the behavior you are looking for, mail is left on the server and synchronized between clients.

I personally use K9 mail for my work email and have it set up as IMAP instead of POP.

[dcgore]

Check the settings of your email client. I have gmail and there is an option in the forwarding/pop section where if email is accessed with pop clients then it gets deleted in gmail.

[reybie]

I don't think he's using Gmail, if he was he would be using the Gmail app.

[SM05]

Thanks for all of the replies. I've got several personal Comcast email accounts configured on my phone. And correct, PC client is setup as you'd expect to delete the email from the server. I guess I didn't realize that this phone Inbox sync is built in and that there is was no way to turn it off. I just found wife's iPhone 3G works a lot more conveniently out of the box by not syncing Inbox. So, once message is on the phone it can either stay in Inbox, be deleted to end up in Trash or be permanently deleted, regardless what we do on PC email client.

Case in point how inconvenient this is... I email myself from my PC an address or some other piece of info I need before I leave for say a meeting. I close PC email client, check my phone and see that it's been delivered. Before leaving I realize I need to check some other email, start the PC client for a sec, which of course retrieves that email I sent previously, and then shut it down later. If I try to check that email on my phone later on, it's gone of course.

Very irritating. Wish I could configure this one aspect of it. I've gotten used to not having signatures support, not having adequate folders support, not able to move message from Trash back to Inbox, not having some sort of delete all messages or scheduled delete option, but that other one is the most irritating IMHO. Thanks for listening.

[dtboos#CB]

use the K-9 email app instead of the built in "email" app. Much better and more customization allowed.

[SM05]

Gave the latest K9 a try. New unreleased version looks much better than the last time I tried it. I still don't see how I can configure it to not delete messages from my Inbox on sync.

[dtboos#CB]

Gave the latest K9 a try. New unreleased version looks much better than the last time I tried it. I still don't see how I can configure it to not delete messages from my Inbox on sync.

Did you try turning the folder sync class to "none" in folder settings on the inbox? Not sure if that works as I've never tried setting it up the way you are looking for.

[reybie]

If your mail server supports IMAP, instead of selecting POP.

[SM05]

Comcast has a POP3 server only afaik.

So, I give the latest K-9 app version a try, released 2 days ago btw. Set up all 4 of my Comcast accounts to poll 2 of them every 15 mins and 2 other ones every hour. All works fine for about a day, never mind that it still syncs the Inbox like I described earlier. Today around noon I notice that I had no email notification on the phone for a few hours while retrieving email for the 1st time on my PC client. I check K-9 and its says "polling: off" or something like that for all configured accounts. I did see an error logged about not being able to connect an hour+ earlier but didn't look like it had ever recovered from that. Back to the lackluster stock email app. Seeh...

[SM05]

OK, seems that Gmail is the answer. I've setup Gmail to poll/forward all my Comcast accounts, which solved my original problem. So, Comcast via email app vs. Comcast through Gmail app breakdown:

Pros:
1. Push email, which results in faster email delivery.
2. No Comcast Inbox syncing issue I was talking about earlier.
3. No polling on the phone should result in better battery life

Cons:
1. Not crazy about all of the labels management in Gmail app
2. Wish there was more settings like color scheme, per-account signature, etc.

HTH.

[reybie]

Yeah, Gmail labeling takes a bit getting used to. Once you get yourself trained that it's just like a folder then things get smoother.

[SM05]

So, I've converted it all to Gmail now. One thing I ran into is that their POP3 integration server polls accounts at some varied times. One cannot change those times as they are determined by Gmail. My understanding is that they analyze how often you receive email on a given account. My guesstimate is that if account doesn't get any email for awhile, they start upping the poll time.

So, my personal email comes in burst. Nothing for a few hours, then a chain of emails back and force, which I might participate in and then nothing again. Checking Gmail update frequency today, I saw that it was pushed back to update in some 20-40+ minutes. For me, that's just too long for it to sit there. As I said earlier, there is no way to force it to update more frequently.

I kind of like the predictability knowing that within 15 mins (or whatever the configured time is) I'm guaranteed to have my email checked. So, I'll have to see how that goes if I can live with this side of Gmail. This could end up being a showstopper for me after all.

[reybie]

Some have gone to the trouble of setting up an automated mailer to send emails to their POP account to make it look "active", thus making GMail check it more often than it would if it were left alone.