Erik Jacobs A Real American Hero

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.

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.

*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.