Email inbox empty after ICS update - help!

[J515OP]

Strange but I see why it is happening. I'm not sure why you weren't having issues pre-ICS. It sounds like your pc is simply pulling the emails off the server before your mail app can get to them. Perhaps the change in ICS is that it checks the server at a different time so now your pc is getting to the mail first and removing it before it gets to the tablet or ICS has a different way it handles local temp copies of mail for off line viewing that no longer makes them available once they are off the server.

I was hoping a program like K9 might have some options for you to compensate for that. If it is important to get mail on the tablet you might want to at least temporarily change the pc settings to leave a copy on the server.

JP

 

[mmmeenehan]

The same thing happened to me with the ICE upgrade. Lost all pop emails stored locally in inbox. ICE has made the pop email app much more unreliable. The app frequently loses replys to email. I mean the 'reply' window just disappears after I spend several minutes typing in it. Very frustrating (no, it doesn't 'send' the reply).
Mike

 

[J515OP]

Very strange indeed. One of the best improvements I have found so far in ICS is the revised mail apps and other apps optimized for tablets. That is of course without the sync problem. Is this just in the email app or also the Gmail app?

I wonder if this is an Acer problem since I'm not seeing it on my non-Acer ICS device? Does anybody have stock ICS to compare it to, to see if Acer has tried to put their own spin on the mail app and messed it up through some sort of skinning?

 

[Douvie]

The same thing happened to me with the ICE upgrade. Lost all pop emails stored locally in inbox. ICE has made the pop email app much more unreliable. The app frequently loses replys to email. I mean the 'reply' window just disappears after I spend several minutes typing in it. Very frustrating (no, it doesn't 'send' the reply).
Mike

Don't use POP, POP 3 if you want to sync mail to your tablet as well. The format used by GMAIL and other similar web-based email providers is IMAPI.

Timing is a issue especially if your PC gets to your isp-based email first and then deletes the emails.

One reason why I don't sync my POP email to my tablet.

 

[a100can]

This happened to me also. It appears the stock email client v4.1 for POP3 does not follow the 'normal' processing as we users have come to expect. Android does not even warn the user of the app's shortcomings. Android has come up with it own way how to process POP3. The email client (acer?) on honeycomb worked as expected. If you search the Android Issues for "email POP3" at Google Code you will see this particular bug going on for years and the developers keep declining the problem. They say it conforms to their design; they just don't understand that their design is flawed! Any email in the ICS inbox that is not currently on the POP3 server will just vanish into thin air! What a joke! Wake up Android Developers!

 

[Mrhelper]

It is really a pain to lose messages, and this issue is confusing. The Android developers appear to have made design decisions based on what they thought a majority of users would like. The email client appears to work as it should in that regard. Some effective warning about the apparent change from what many users had come to expect by experience with HC may have been appropriate though.

This issue is not exclusive to the Acer a500. It is a general Android ICS issue. It appears that folks with other devices were dealing with this issue when they went to ICS also. This thread was from January: http://android.stackexchange.com/qu...without-removing-local-messages-that-have-bee. I found some references to this for several other devices also.

Many users also seem to be confused about how to use POP3 services, and to be fair it is a bit tricky. This is also exacerbated by confusion about differences between desktop and mobile email client implementation strategies, which I believe to be a reasonable basis for the design decisions I mention above.

There are differences in design strategies between mobile devices -- e.g. Android -- and desktop PCs. The typical mobile email strategy is to provide simple efficient access to new messages for mobile reading, and not on managing or storing large archives of messages. That's a role for the desktop PC by virtue of its typically greater power, storage, and network resources. Android was designed to run on numerous devices, many with 3" screens. Those devices must run for days on a single charge, and often simultaneously stream music/video, handle calls, texting, take photos, and manage email. Most also do not have Tegra 2/3s, and 32GB of memory, and typically use only cellular network access, vs. wifi for a desktop or notebook PC.

The only significant management function available then on the Android client is the option to delete messages from the server when deleted from the device. If you don't set this option, messages are never deleted from the server, and more recent deletes using the Android client remain visible in the trash folder indefinitely unless deleted from the server by using your PC.

One big source of confusion then is that some Android users apparently assumed that the mobile Android email client would keep messages that had been deleted from the server as their home PCs do. This assumption was also apparently based on experience with earlier Android OS versions. The ICS developers or Acer could have done a better job explaining such differences, or possibly even provided an option setting giving users the choice.

How I use POP services:
I want to see my recently read messages on my tablet and PC, regardless of where I've read each. To accomplish this with POP3, I set the PC email client option to download copies of messages, and also leave copies on the server. The Android client does this part by default, and there is no option to change it -- i.e., messages are not automatically deleted from the server when downloaded by the Android client.

When I download messages then, all of the clients merely pull copies. The original messages stay intact on the servers.

When I delete messages on my PC, I don't want to see those messages on my tablet, and vice-versa, so I intentionally set the options on both my PCs and tablet to delete messages on the server when I delete them in any client.

When I sync, the clients also sync my deletes to the servers, because I have set the options on each to do that, so deletes of messages that other clients have not yet downloaded are also eliminated entirely from future download by any client.

People who lost email after ICS update had apparently configured their PC clients to delete messages, and had expectations that these messages would stay on the mobile Android client. If they had set their various email clients to retain copies on the server after download, they would not likely have lost a single email message. Reliable backups would have mitigated this also.

The current Android email client is apparently designed to help manage the email space on your device by downloading/showing only 25 messages at a time. This ensures satisfactory and consistent email client performance, so syncing and accessing email over wireless telephony and wifi takes less time and effort, and the time taken is consistently predictable for each email client use. It also shows only messages that you have decided to keep on the server, to provide better sychronization with your other email clients. The Android email client was apparently not intended to be a permanent email store. If it did not manage email as it does, email client performance would suffer, and so would user experience. Maybe not on high powered tablet devices, but Android was designed to run on other less powerful devices also.

I really like the Android email client. It is clean, reasonably fast, reliable so far, and very easy to use. A nice job overall.

 

[J515OP]

Mrhelper that is a good explanation to users who might just be seeing red because of an unexpected behavior even if it is one they unknowingly contributed to. For those having email sync issues it would be wise to look into the points Mrhelper raises above as well as to look into the differences between IMAP and POP3 to see which suits you. Here is a good article to help you decide Email: What’s the Difference Between POP3, IMAP, and Exchange? - How-To Geek (hint: apps act as email clients).

JP

 

[Mrhelper]

... Here is a good article to help you decide Email: What’s the Difference Between POP3, IMAP, and Exchange? - How-To Geek (hint: apps act as email clients).

JP

That's a clear and concise article. In addition to what the author says about POP3, the protocol does allow the client to specify that messages are only copied and not deleted. Deleting is the default though, as noted in the article, and you have to remember to change that option when you set up a PC client if you expect messages to be available at other clients. The opposite is true for the Android client. It is implemented as a mobile client, and the default is apparently based on an assumption that you always want new messages on your home PC, and so it always leaves copies on the server after download. For your PCs though, you have to deliberately set that option to leave copies on the server after download, supporting shared use of POP3 email services between multiple clients, so one client does not delete messages before another retrieves them.

 

[Douvie]

Just to add additional information. As Microsoft now has a "cloud version" of EXCHANGE that is going to add more complications to what MrHelper has put forward.

Murphy was a very smart man.
If you've made contingencies for 13 things to go wrong, beware a 14th will soon come along.

 

[a100can]

Thanks for your input MrHelper. In your first paragragh you make a comment that there is distinction betwwen PC mail and mobile mail. Perhaps that is so, and the different protocols are there to address that. I use my Acer A100 as a 'PC'. In fact I dont own a PC. I set the email client up for POP3 and I would EXPECT that the email messages that have been previously downloaded would not disappear without a trace until I specifically deleted them from the client. If I wanted IMAP functionality, I would have have set the email client to access my email via IMAP! I do not agree with your statement that the Android email client is doing this correctly. It is not following generally expected processing. Why is it OK to leave messages on a PC, but not OK to do the same on a mobile device?

 

[Douvie]

Well your other option is leave them in the CLOUD. They can be always there but not on your PC or TABLET. He was looking at the shear processing power and the heaps of available space that would exist on a PC. A tablet is limited in both these areas.



We have a policy here. Anyone who calls A500 a computer gets sent into the corner and the punishment is ...a bowl of ice cream. But you have an A100 - extra award chocolate topping.

 

[a100can]

Interesting discussion what defines a 'computer'. I wrote an email client well over a decade ago for a handheld device ... I didn't see that its slow processor or limited storage a limitation; there are programming techniques that can be utilized to save space and speed up processing; I started programming on a PDP-11 computer. This A100 I am using runs at least 100 times faster than that handheld device and has the capability of 32GB of storage! Hardly what I would call limited to do a SIMPLE programming task of processing email; and I do mean simple! It does take some code, but it is not a complicated task. Overall, I really like how the stock email v4.1 client works, except that the POP3 needs to conform to what a POP3 client normally does on any "computer" or device. I don't know if Acer tweeked the email client on the honeycomb OS, but it did process POP3 correctly (as a user would expect on his/her PC).

 

[Mrhelper]

Thanks for your input MrHelper. In your first paragragh you make a comment that there is distinction betwwen PC mail and mobile mail. Perhaps that is so, and the different protocols are there to address that. I use my Acer A100 as a 'PC'. In fact I dont own a PC. I set the email client up for POP3 and I would EXPECT that the email messages that have been previously downloaded would not disappear without a trace until I specifically deleted them from the client. If I wanted IMAP functionality, I would have have set the email client to access my email via IMAP! I do not agree with your statement that the Android email client is doing this correctly. It is not following generally expected processing. Why is it OK to leave messages on a PC, but not OK to do the same on a mobile device?

Android developers apparently made some design decisions based on what they thought would make the greatest number of users happy, at the expense of others. Not all Android devices are as well endowed as these tablets, and often have to do quite a bit of simultaneous work, while communicating over spotty cellular networks. My intent in the earlier post was to state that I understand how the developers concluded what they did. Users then either agree or disagree with what they chose based on personal preferences. My statement about them getting it "right" was a poor choice of words. It may be "right" for some but not right for others. It's subjective, and I changed my post above to reflect this.

Another aspect affecting this seems to be worth mentioning here: I've noticed that the Android package that is delivered with any given device tends to focus more on the OS/platform than on the applications. The basic email clients appear to be little more than slightly polished test examples. In my case, I am satisfied with that -- but there are choices. The OS developers and device manufacturers tend to leave most of the app development up to the public development community. One of the first things I noticed was that there was no file manager app delivered with the tablet. I'm thinking... "what!?..." Then I got into the Market, and it all became much more clear. The menu of app choices there was much richer than you can find on the PC, where for example, MS provides the file explorer that intrudes everywhere, and that you can't delete. If it hangs or dies, the whole desktop UI goes with it until restart. I prefer the market choice, and the competive spirit there is clearly generating some remarkably low cost, feature rich apps.

The connection I'm trying to make then between the email client issue, and this last paragraph about the app market is that choices about certain options for the email client may not have been as high on the list as many other development issues. They were probably much more intent on providing a faster, smoother, more stable platform overall to support as many apps as possible, and on as many devices as possible.