Yahoo! mail servers blamed for WinPho 7 data spew bug
IMAP mishap?
Microsoft's own Mail app and Yahoo! Mail have been implicated by the software giant as the cause of the Windows Phone 7 bug that has caused some handsets to rack up users' data transfer tallies.
Microsoft last night blamed an "inefficiency" in the way its Windows Phone Mail app talks to Yahoo! Mail. The result: "larger than expected data usage for a very small percentage of users".
Essentially, the app appears to be downloading rather more email than it needs to, pulling in two weeks' worth of messages at a time, even if they have been read.
The problem seems to affect IMAP accounts rather than POP, another common email transfer protocol. According to a report by website Windows Phone Secrets, Yahoo!'s Windows Mobile-oriented IMAP servers incorrectly implement IMAP's Fetch command, though Yahoo! has yet to confirm this.
Microsoft said it and Yahoo! were working on a fix which will be released "in the coming weeks".
In the meantime, reduce the frequency at which Mail checks Yahoo! Mail for new messages and the period over which its bulk download feature pulls in messages. ®
COMMENTS
I'm not buying this
Yahoo have written bad code that only affects winpho.. hmm really? just how many other phones are having problems with yahoo? doesn't sound like a yahoo problem to me... sound like MSpin to me.
People will only be reporting the issue if...
8) They realise they're using unreasonably high bandwidth.
9) They post it somewhere widely accessible, rather than just contacting their provider or MS.
I find it amusing that MS may be inconvenienced by someone else not complying with standards.
Plausible
While maybe not the only cause, it does strike me as possible. When I connected my Windows Mobile 6.1 phone to Yahoo with IMAP, it frequently tried to download my entire Yahoo mailbox despite being set to grab on the last two days.
Well...
People will only be reporting the issue if...
1) They use Yahoo mail
2) They use IMAP to access Yahoo mail
3) They have high volumes of emails
4) They are checking their data usage
5) They actually notice their usage has gone up a lot
6) They sync with Yahoo often
7) They back-sync more than a couple of days
So, quite a narrow section of the WP7 using fraternity then.
And yes I'm another WP7 user, but I'm using Hotmail so no problems from my end.
If Yahoo are not implementing the IMAP protocol correctly, and it certainly sounds like they aren't, then it's definitely not Microsoft's fault. Although you would have thought that MS would have discovered the fault in pre-production tests, and that they would have released this info a lot sooner to those affected and presumably paying excesses on their data plans.
I'm not buying this
Compare the number of users reporting the issue against the number of users using Yahoo! mail...
Unless of course the issue is for ALL IMAP accounts...
(Yes, I'm the other WP7 user)
