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Google? Doh! iphone

Throw away the iPhone? or throw away Gmail? Decisions, decisions…

For the past week, my iPhone’s have been unable to use Gmail. After approximately 4 hours, gmail locks you out of IMAP completely, unless/until you force-kill Apple’s mail client. The problem is … if you force-kill the client, you lose all emails you wrote, and you lose all emails you filed into IMAP folders (Apple’s client refuses to save state – it requires the server to do it).

Nothing has changed on the phones – and Google has been putting up irritating “stop using gmail, use the new gmail” ads for the same period of time – so I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that someone at Google changed something on the IMAP protocol that makes it no longer work correctly with iPhone.

I just had to write the same email for the second time, and re-file 50+ emails for the third time – and I’m giving up. You just can’t use gmail on an iOS 4 iPhone right now (I’m guessing that iOS 5 works OK, or there’d be an internet rage fest going on.

So. What to do. Dump the iPhone (switch to Android as my main phone, perhaps?)?

Or decide that enough’s enough, gmail is just too damn annoying these days (e.g. the 3 week period earlier this year where “reply all” was disabled on my gmail account) … I’ve heard there’s an email-for-life system called … hotmail?

Hmm…

5 replies on “Throw away the iPhone? or throw away Gmail? Decisions, decisions…”

Why are you using IMAP and not Exchange/Activesync on your gmail account? That works fine for me.

Good question – simple answer: previously, it didn’t work (for my gmail account, last time I tried, it never managed to login on my account). But that was almost a year ago now (when iOS 4 was out, but I hadn’t upgraded yet).

I *ahem* completely forgot about ActiveSync after the 4.x upgrade, until you mentioned it now. I noticed that apple had changed the way Mail.app interfaces to Gmail (e.g. some of the settings became hardcoded), but otherwise … just forgot :(.

I just tried setting it up now, and it seems to be working fine first time, although I need to leave it overnight to sync my bajillion email folders.

Thanks, Dan!

UPDATE: AS ran OK … for the first 8 hours, LOL. Then it crashed in same way as IMAP: mail client kept timing out trying to connect to gmail.

The difference is that Exchange/AS “resets” itself after 1-3 minutes of this, instead of me having to manually force-kill the Mail app.

So … Yeah, it looks like Google have nerfed my gmail account (I expect I’m being A/B tested, and this bug is an unfortunate side effect that only affects myself and a few hundred others).

On the downside … AS used up my mobile/cell bandwidth for the month, in the space of a few days. Even though I did most of the synching over wifi, the remainder, combined with PUSH updates, was too much. First time that’s happened in almost 2 years…

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