Verizon Galaxy S8 mail/data idiosyncrasy

[aweber1nj]

Since upgrading from my GS6E (and this includes upgrading to Nougat), my email has been way less reliable.

I have two (really three) separate email clients I use almost constantly: K9 (home/personal), Touchdown HD (work), and GMail (of course).

Post upgrade, K9 would not sync. Really, it would sync for a while (few hours), but then stop. I would have to manually press the update/sync to fetch new email. I would have to continue that manual-sync until killing and restarting the app, then it would seem to work for a few hours again. Repeat. I used K9 for many years, but ditched it for MailDroid in hopes there would be a better situation.

MailDroid seems a little better, but often I open it and see "No Network" (but there is...for sure). Then I have to kickstart that too.

I thought Touchdown was OK, but it doesn't seem to be sync'ing as rapidly as I would like (or have seen in the past) either. Used to be that my phone would vibrate even before my desktop Outlook would show the new email. Past few days I see emails arrive on my desktop and sometimes my phone does not show the email until I open it (and sometimes still not until I manually refresh Touchdown).

Since this seems to be across multiple email clients, I'm wondering if it's something to do with the S8 or Nougat in general? I tried disabling the "app monitoring" feature in the battery settings to see if that might have been interfering with the email apps using the network in the background, but it doesn't seem to have helped. (Maybe there is another setting somewhere? I will read up on this new "doze" feature.)

Has anyone else seen this anomoly? I use my phone primarily for work, so I need reliable email, not WQHD+ gaming (nothing against that, just sayin).

Appreciate any ideas on troubleshooting.

-AJ

 

[felloffthetruck]

I'm using Aquamail Pro with the Verizon S8+ and it's works 100%

 

[aweber1nj]

@felloffthetruck

I should have clarified: I don't think it matters, but my MailDroid is connecting to an (IDLE-capable) IMAP server. Is yours polling or using IMAP-IDLE (push)?

Thanks for the quick feedback. Still not sure why I should blame this on an email client, since at least 2 don't work reliably and they're configured against two different sources/servers - one IMAPS and one ActiveSync.

 

[anon(238680)]

There are way too many settings that affect notifications and syncing IMO. I was with you, couldn't get email unless I opened Gmail which contains all my accounts. Playing around a few days ago and I changed something that made it all work. I have also found you should reboot after changing some of the settings. And sorry, I can't remember what I had changed, but it was pretty obscure. Don't give up on the phone. Samsung also has a pretty responsive presence on Facebook, they're working on a Contacts issue for me now.

 

[aweber1nj]

OK, just to clarify, there is a difference between receiving email and notifying the phone owner of the received email. Both are important, but in this case, I can definitely say that the emails aren't even being received. I think I receive notifications accurately when they ARE received.

 

[anon(238680)]

OK, just to clarify, there is a difference between receiving email and notifying the phone owner of the received email.

Okay, my bad, misunderstood your situation.

 

[maildroiddev]

There is something going on with the S8 that kills the connection beyond doze. Have you turned off Doze on the S8? Just so you, No Network Connection in MailDroid can also mean you have internet connection, but can't connect to the mail server itself.

 

[aweber1nj]

@maildroiddev: Appreciate you being responsive here. I have already emailed you about this directly and, (for everyone else's information) you replied promptly.

Specific to MailDroid, one example is that I have my phone lying on my desk, with a WiFi access point less than 3ft away. Neither the phone nor the AP is moving. There are many times I pick up my phone, unlock it, and MailDroid is in the "No Network Connection" state. The mail server is on my LAN (same network as the access point). I do not believe it is the underlying network.

(Unless MailDroid is somehow caching the IP address of the mail server and it is confusing the external lookup with the internal lookup - because on the LAN it would receive an internal IP address from DNS; on 4G it would receive an external, NAT'ed address. Even then, technically that should still work; just the traffic would try and exit the gateway and come back in.)

Thanks.

 

[maildroiddev]

@maildroiddev: Appreciate you being responsive here. I have already emailed you about this directly and, (for everyone else's information) you replied promptly.

Specific to MailDroid, one example is that I have my phone lying on my desk, with a WiFi access point less than 3ft away. Neither the phone nor the AP is moving. There are many times I pick up my phone, unlock it, and MailDroid is in the "No Network Connection" state. The mail server is on my LAN (same network as the access point). I do not believe it is the underlying network.

(Unless MailDroid is somehow caching the IP address of the mail server and it is confusing the external lookup with the internal lookup - because on the LAN it would receive an internal IP address from DNS; on 4G it would receive an external, NAT'ed address. Even then, technically that should still work; just the traffic would try and exit the gateway and come back in.)

Thanks.

I don't believe it is the network, I think it is something the S8 is doing. Having said that, did you turn off Doze?

Doze is a new Android feature starting in 6.0 and improved upon in 7.0. The idea is to help save battery by not allowing apps to create connections to the internet behind the scenes when the device is not turned on or moved for a small amount of time. They want people to use Google Messaging to alert devices instead and that in itself has its own issues. Now, you can imagine that if they don't allow you to connect to the net, this becomes a big issue, especially for an email app. What you need to do is change the 'Doze' feature and see if that helps. You can white-list MailDroid to bypass certain restrictions of Doze by going to Android Settings, battery, click on the menu in the top right corner called More, choose Optimize Battery Usage, Click on the dropdown where it says Apps not Optimized, choose all apps, find MailDroid and choose Off. Click back a few times to get back to the main screen and let me know if this works better

 

[aweber1nj]

To be honest, I guestimated it was the Doze feature from the start, but I may have tried to turn it off in the wrong place. Samsung (don't know if it's Nougat) has a "Power Saving Mode" that has options "Off, Mid, Max" and it was set to "Mid" by default. So I turned it Off. That didn't seem to help anything. I found the screen you were referring to and switched off MailDroid. Let's see if that helps.

Thanks again