high data with default email app

[jemalone]

Has anyone else noticed that the built in email app for the Skyrocket seems to use excessive data when you have an Exchange account setup. I had 2 gigs of data used in my fist 5 days and it was 98% email usage. I removed the exchange work email and the data usage stopping being so high over the weekend. I then 9installed Touchdown trial and it does not seem to use so much data when I setup the exchange work account with it.. My battery usage improved a also after remove the exchange account from the default email app.

 

[s3ntrax]

what is the time period that you're syncing? maybe if you're trying to sync your email too far back its trying to grab a lot of emails (maybe with attachments?)

 

[jemalone]

I'm only syncing 3 days of email, I changed it from a week to 3 day and it was still very high data usage. I did not have this problem on my DrodX over on Verizon. Touchdown for exchange is not using that much data like the default mail app does. Nor is the battery drain that bad. I would prefer to use the default mail app since it syncs my contacts to my phone using the default contact list where as Touchdown does not.

 

[jemalone]

I think I will do a factory reset this weekend and see if that helps. I really want to use the default email app instead of touchdown for my work email. On my DroidX with Verizon I did not see this high data usage with email. Has anyone else notice this.

thanks

Jack

 

[Willonymous]

Same thing happened to me with the default email set-up using a Yahoo account. For some reason, when I switched to the "premium" account setup, the problem went away. It was ridiculous -- 800 mb/day.

 

[robor007]

My wife's Skyrocket went from 0 to 1.9GB of data used in less than 4 days. One transfer was over 900MB, another over 500MB, and another over 300MB. She doesn't stream video or music. Her usual tasks are checking Email (Yahoo Mail client), Facebook, and casual web browsing. Her usage in December was 250MB-ish.

I looked over her phone and didn't see any reason for the data usage. For kicks, I installed Lookout and AVG and did scans. Both came up clean with the exception of it being rooted and allowing 'Unknown sources'.

A 45 minute call to AT&T resulted in no help whatsoever. All they could offer was to credit the overage when it goes past 2GB.

 

[blweldon2]

Reset the phone and install traffic monitor to see what uses all the data.

Sent from my Skyrocket.

 

[robor007]

Reset the phone and install traffic monitor to see what uses all the data.

Sent from my Skyrocket.

When you say 'reset' do you mean factory restore?

Can traffic monitor be used without doing a reset?

 

[blweldon2]

Yes it can, but recommend the factory reset to stop anything else that might be using high amounts of data. The traffic monitor will tell you how much data you have used and which apps used what.

Sent from my Skyrocket.

 

[robor007]

I put Traffic Monitor on both of our phones. Great app. Thanks!

 

[blweldon2]

I keep the widget on my homescreen to monitor my data usage. It is a very handy app. You can also enable warnings for when you get close to your data limit.

Sent from my Skyrocket.

 

[bag-o-droid]

I had a similar issue using the default email app with my POP3 work email. A month ago I signed a new contract and got the Galaxy S2. Within 3 weeks I had used 400 MB compared to less than 100MB per month (including surfing on Opera Mini) on my old Nokia E72.

I only realised this after receiving my first account. I installed a data traffic monitor and found that in the last 14 days I had used 172MB on email alone. Then by chance a couple of days ago I had an issue with the email application on my work PC and I had to log into the web-interface of my email account. I had 190MB of accumulated emails. I had chosen to leave the mail on the server to enable me to check them on my phone too. But I anyway deleted them so that I did not need to re-download everything to my desktop email application. After that, when I checked email on my Galaxy S2 there were no emails, at all.

Now I realise that the default email app on the Galaxy S2 does not cache the emails, but constantly downloads and re-downloads them when one want to access them. I had the account set up as checking manually every 5 minutes. Now I understand were all the megabytes were disappearing. Having read the above posts, I have now set up my work email on my phone as a premium account; hopefully the "push" service will reduce the data usage. I will have to just monitor the traffic as the emails build up on the server again, but perhaps the "push" service is not affected by that?

I feel the app could be improved on by Samsung:
- store the messages locally
- only to download the headers until the email or attachments are opened.

By comparison, my Yahoo Mail app sent more than it received, yet I only use them to receive mail. Then it still only used 8MB (6mb up and 2mb down in the last two weeks.) checking 3 fairly inactive accounts. The Gmail app with 6 accounts has used 0.75mb up and 3.6mb down in the same time period. This should put in perspective how bad the default Samsung email app really is on a manual POP3 account.

 

[Mharka13]

You probably have free apps that has advertising. That's data hog right off bat. Uninstall those free apps. They're not worth it.

 

[andrewffay]

I am having the same issue with a Droid 4 on Verizon. I have been using this phone for a few months with no issues. A few things have happened recently that make it difficult to know what may be causing the issue: the phone recently upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich, Verizon switched me from unlimited data to the share data plan, work did a big upgrade on Exchange, and 4G just came into our area - but we live in the fringe area of the 4G and it is going in/out constantly.

Any Ideas?

 

[Magnious]

Just started having this issue. I was hoping that I would find some help. Verizon is stating that I've used 37GB of data!! I am sooo happy that I have unlimited.....or else I would be furious right now.

 

[duckduke]

My wife's SII Skyrocket - on a 3G data plan - has had data issues a few times. She is really not a heavy user..... she has an iphone S4 for work that gets much heavier use.

Due to data issues .... the iphone got used to stream Pandora when running, etc etc.

The SII Skyrocket was used for a few calls, a few texts, some FB access, etc. etc.

She had re'cd warning emails from ATT and I looked online and she is at 3.425M --- in the first 15 days of the month ----- with 15 remaining.

DADDY GOES INTO ACTION:
(A widget had already been set to monitor open applications---- almost useless since most data appears to be eaten by applications not showing as open)
-I turned off the "mobile" radio and turned on WiFi......(so data could be monitored over Wifi rather than mobile ATT data)
-Installed a data monitoring app ('Data Monitor' I think)
In 2 hours we found where Google Maps had used about about 95% of 7M. We turned off all 'Google Map' services.

-----my wife turned the WiFi off befoe going to bed (without my knowledge) so nothing more was learned overnight

--The next morning about 7:30am I turned the "mobile" radio back on to monitor data during the day
--She has almost not used the phone except it was receiving email, a couple of texts.... about it.
--In 8 hours ........ 96M ..... thats about 12M/hr = 288M/day = 8.6Gigs/month ........... this is a problem
--95% of the useage is from EMAIL ...... go figure

So .........I am very curious. What can the big problem with be with the native email????? Why is it such a data hog???? Is there some secret setting required for the email to keep it from eating 8Gig or more a month ??????????

Very interested to hear any info on this. Silly to pay $80-90/month for a phone plan just have the data exceeded by a native email app.

 

[duckduke]

Last night ...... I had everything turned off that I could think of

But....... I had the phone in airplane mode with WiFi on so I could monitor data usage over WiFI

Email check frequency was set on "Never"

At 7am in the morning it had used 7Mb .......... 90% email.

That's the equivalent of 0.7Gigs/month without picking up the phone. This is unacceptable.

The default email program is killing me. Right now it's time to consider a wipe and OS re-install or JellyBean upgrade and hope the problem gets resolved.

 

[jcfuller]

My parents and I share our data plan, and we had only gone over our limit once in the last year. All of the sudden, we started receiving alerts that we had used 50%, then 75%, then 90% in rapid succession. We looked at the usage on all of our phones, and I found out that my Thunderbolt had used 3GB in less than ten days. Nearly all of that was attributed to the native Mail app that I only use for my POP3 account. I started taking some screenshots, and when I went into the gallery, I stumbled onto the fact that there were thousands and thousands of copies of the same image in my downloaded images folder that was attached to one of the emails in my inbox. The Mail app had apparently downloaded and re-downloaded the attached image on that email many thousands of times... WHYYYYYYYY does it use the gallery in the first place, and WHYYYYYYYY can't it remember that it has already downloaded the attachment? This is *incredibly* stupid and just cost us an overage charge. I had not been paying too much attention to my usage because as I said, we almost never went over the limit. Then, all of the sudden, it skyrocketed. It's one thing to say that I should have kept a better eye on it, but this is the kind of thing that makes ya facepalm.

Apparently, every single time that the native Mail app on the Thunderbolt syncs with a POP3 account (sounds like this happens for all phones with this native Mail app), it downloads a NEW copy of the attachment, hence the thousands of duplicated images. If your Mail app is responsible for your data usage jumping to insane levels, I'd recommend taking a look at your downloaded images folder. It's probably full of duplicated images.

Over the last hour or so, I've been digging further into the forums, and there are more settings available in the app for Exchange accounts that let you set whether it downloads the attachments when it syncs, but as far as I could find, there are no workarounds using the native app for "run-o-the-mill" accounts other than to probably either set the phone to delete the emails from the server after downloading them (which I do NOT want to do, and unfortunately, IMAP is not an option for this account) or to set it to manually sync when I open the app and just deal with it duplicating each time I open it.

Other options would be to route that account through gmail, which is what I intend to do, or to install a 3rd party app and remove the account from the native app.