Strange POP behaviour, and long distance question

L

Lotto510

New member
I just got an HTC Desire through Telus (running Eclair), and while I'm absolutely loving it, I have a couple of questions.

1. I have an email address set up as a POP account. (I used this same email address on my previous phone without issues.) I read my mail on the phone during the day, then in the evening I access it from my computer, downloading the messages into Thunderbird and removing them from the server. On the phone, the next time it checks that email account, I would expect it to remove the messages from my phone, as they've been deleted from the server. It doesn't, though, and I then have to delete everything a second time. I've never had to do this in any other way of accessing this email account. Does anyone have any thoughts on how I can get back to the behaviour I'm expecting?

2. Telus seems to be one of the very few carriers who won't allow a long distance call to go through without a "1" in front of it. My previous phones have had an option to automatically put a "1" in fron the numbers when dialing, but I'm not seeing anything like that. Is there any way to do this (other than just manually putting a "1" at the front of every number in the contacts)?

Thank you!
 
1. Just set it up as IMAP? That's the behavior you want (AKA: showing the latest emails only, until they're popped).

2. There are phone number fixing apps in the Market. I can't remember the names off the top of my head. But you should be able to append a 1 to all the numbers.
 
This particular account doesn't support IMAP, and I've always been able to get the behaviour I wanted out of POP before with this account...

I hadn't found an app yet, but I'll keep looking. If anyone has a suggestion, though, that'd be great. (ETA: I'm looking for something that will append automatically when dialing, not something that will just change the info for existing contacts.)

Thanks!
 
IMAP would be correct.

To be clear, POP3 checks for any new email on the server, and downloads it if that specific device hasn't already downloaded it. That's it. It does not delete emails off the device if they are no longer present on the server. Therefore each device maintains its own list, and every email you receive must be deleted from every device manually if it has been downloaded onto that device.

Depending how the device is configured, it may delete the email (or not) from the server once it has downloaded it. This is a standard option.

IMAP mirrors the emails that are on the server. So if you delete an email using one device, all the other devices remove that email too.
 
My email provider for this account doesn't even offer IMAP. I'm not looking for all the folders to sync. I merely want the device to show what emails are on the server (so if something gets deleted from the server, it gets removed from the device). This exact same POP account has been set up on numerous phones this way in the past, and always worked.
 
Well, the POP3 protocol simply doesn't work that way.

If you have one device set up to delete emails from the server, the the other device may not get them if it checks for the email after they've already been deleted. So, assuming the other phones weren't Android or Blackberries they probably only checked for emails when you specifically ran the email app, as opposed to in the background every X minutes like it does on Android. That would mean if you delete an email on your PC it would delete off the server, and then when you run the email app on your phone the email would have already been deleted so wouldn't be there to download onto your phone.

But, I can categorically state that POP3 does not support automatic email removal of emails that have already been downloaded but deleted off the server. You have to use IMAP for that.
 
The other phones were WinMo, and checked in the background. The emails would be on my phone, and then when I downloaded them onto my computer (deleting them from the server) or just flat out deleted them from the server, then the next time my phone automatically checked for email it would just remove them from the device if they were no longer on the server. Basically it worked like webmail - you don't have to delete something from a webmail interface again if it's been deleted from the server. Maybe this was a WinMo thing? I never thought I'd miss something from WinMo. *sigh* And I 100% can't use IMAP on this account (my primary email account for the last 13 years) because the provider doesn't offer it. Looks like I'll have to get used to multiple deletes or switch email addresses, both of which sound like incredibly poor options. I guess I could set up some forwarding or redirection or something, but definitely not ideal. *sigh*
 
Are you 100% sure they don't support IMAP. The behaviour you're describing is exactly how IMAP works. The vast majority of email providers do support IMAP, as it's usually preferred, and required for webmail to work. So if they have webmail, they have IMAP. However, it's possible they're firewalling IMAP to keep it internal and just for webmail, but I can't think of any advantage to this. In fact that would be plain weird.
 
Sorry - they have IMAP, but they don't support it unless you're connected using their service. So I can use IMAP if I'm connected through Shaw themselves, but if I'm connecting on a phone (and therefore not through my cable provider) they only allow POP. This is an improvement over a couple of years ago, admittedly, where they didn't even support that and webmail was your *only* option when off their network.

I'm on hold with them right now to double check, but I know it wasn't set up through IMAP before - the server name in my old settings is pop.shaw.ca (or else it's the weirdest named IMAP server ever...)
 
Success!! (Or, at least half success.) I got the email behaviour I was expecting (an email was deleted off the device when deleted off the server) using K-9 instead of the stock email client. K-9 has an option "Sync remote deletions".
 
Yeah that would work too. The problem with sync remote deletions is it's a bit of a hack. It gets a the list of most recent emails on the server like normal so that it can download them, BUT the length of this list is set by the server. It could be as low as 10, or infinite. If it's a low number, emails get deleted off your phone before you get a chance to see them.

In terms of addresses, many domains, especially on smaller ISPs, point to the same server no matter what the prefix. For example, pop3.xxx.com, imap.xxx.com, and mail.xxx.com, ftp.xxx.com may well app be the same IP address.

Glad you found a solution though - I should have thought of K9 at the start.
 
Just confirmed - my ISP definitely does not support IMAP off their network and has no plans to at this time. *sigh* And they're not even a small ISP!

I've never had the problem of things getting deleted off my phone before I read them, so I think this'll work for the time being. There's some stuff about K-9 I like better as well, like the fact there's an actual delete button the screen instead of having to go into a menu every time. Haven't gotten Exchange working properly with it yet, but I'll continue to poke.

Thanks for your help!

Also, still looking for advice re: adding 1 to numbers...
 
Hi!

Don't know if you still have this problem, but if you do I want you to have a look at Prefixer (http://www.253below.com/prefixer). It's free, and will do exactly what you want!

The basic idea behind Prefixer is that you shouldn't really need to care about adding prefixes, suffixes or even remove characters manually. And definitely not edit your whole contact list to suit what your current situation demands.

In Prefixer you may set up and configure your own rules for what actions to take depending on what numbers you call. Based on your set up rules, Prefixer will filter your outgoing calls accordingly, on-the-fly and without your intervention.

Please have a look - and don't hesitate sending us your questions if something should be unclear!
 
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