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T-Mobile G1 Better IMAP mail

So, after posting the other day about broken IMAP mail on the G1, it didn’t take long for a new solution to pop up. Enter the K-9 mail client — an “Android Mutt.”

I haven’t actually tried to see if K-9 fixes any of the folder syncing issues that I was having earlier.  However, what I have noticed is that K-9 handles message deletion much MUCH better. As in messages are actually marked for deletion IMAP style and they disappear from the mailbox.

Perhaps I’ll take some time over this Thanksgiving break to see if folder syncing works right. At least I know that the owners of the K-9 mail project will actually respond to bugs getting posted.

Unfortunately, there are a ton of bugs with the AOL client. I have filed many, but none have been reviewed so far. I’ve learned that the IM portion of Android is not open source, and that it was not written by Google. Hopefully there will be some momentum to get those issues fixed. Until then, however, the inability for the client to stay connected for long periods of time makes it essentially useless to me. Oh bother.


G1 fail?

So the display stopped working on my T-Mobile G1 today.  I’m on hold with T-Mobile right now waiting for a representative.  The screen is powered on, the LED is blinking, the phone is making noises and vibrating like everything is working in the background but it’s blank.

Let’s see what happens.


Refresh IMAP folders in Android (G1) email application

*EDIT* I had filed a bug for this on the Android issue tracker.  It is bug #1096 Shortly after filing this, I did find a workaround.  I have edited below to reflect the changes.

*EDIT* I tried this in a different account and it didn’t work… but I’ll keep trying it to see if it ever does work.  The solution might just be to re-create the accounts. *EDIT*

As I started to add my IMAP email accounts, I noticed that there were folders I didn’t care for.  I didn’t need them, so I nuked them from the webmail interface for the accounts as I couldn’t find any way to delete folders within the Android email application.  To my dismay, I discovered that the Android email application does not appear to refresh IMAP folders frequently (ever).

I found a solution to this issue, though.

  1. Go to the account list in the email application.  You can get there from inside an email account by pressing “menu” and then “accounts”.
  2. Press “menu”
  3. Press “refresh”

You’ll find that the email application reaches out to your IMAP server again and will refresh the folder lists.

It appears that the email application keeps its own “trash” folder, in addition to the one that may already exist on your IMAP account.  But I’ll figure out something about that in a bit.  According to many reports, the delete function doesn’t work right even with this alternate trash folder.  There is an email client called “K9” available in the marketplace that supposedly fixes this issue, but I’ve also heard from an Android developer that it was not implemented “right.”

Generally speaking, if a fix for something broken makes it work, it’s hard to argue with.  K9 also adds some other functionality.  I am just starting to play with it and I’ll let you know how it goes.


G1 in the house

So I have been waiting for something to replace my T-Mobile Sidekick 3 (2.5 if you ask me) for probably close to a year.  I was dis-satisfied with the browser, really dis-satisfied with the email capabilities and my battery had lost some of its charge-holding capabilities.

When I saw that T-Mobile was going to be the first carrier to release an Android-powered phone, I was really happy.  As details of the dream first started coming out, I was even happier.  When I watched the G-1 press release, I was ecstatic.  Now that I have the phone, I have a shit-eating grin.

Sure, it will take some getting used to, but the ability to have *real* IMAP mail right out of the box is amazing.  The integration with Google services has been a tiny bit frustrating, but not so bad over all.  For example, I had to export my contacts from Outlook as CSV and import to GMail.  But GMail decided to lop off mailing addresses for people, so I don’t have them in my phone.  Not super important — I can re-populate those as I go.

One thing I found was that Google introduced an Outlook calendar sync daemon for Windows XP and Vista that works with Outlook ’03 and ’07.  It basically just sits in ram and syncs your GMail calendar to your Outlook calendar, and vice versa.  The nice thing about this?  Now if I enter an appointment on my phone it will go to GMail and then end up in my Outlook — neat!

If only you could directly delete email from the “del” key on the keyboard!

I’ll do my best to post little tips and tricks and neat applications I find as I come across them.  Until then, carry on with your bad phone!