HTC Mail Memory Leak/Bug ("Phone Storage Getting Low")

[indianajonze]

I have reason to believe that HTC Mail has a significant memory leak or bug which is causing all of the "Phone storage is getting low" messages. I've had the phone for 2 weeks as of this thursday. my setup is 4 pop3 email accounts configured during the initial setup in HTC Mail. I've noticed during the two weeks that the HTC Mail app has been steadily ballooning in size. it starts out small enough, just a few megs, but after a day or so jumps to 40-50megs. After that jumps to 80megs, 90megs, 100megs, 110megs etc.

At around 110-115 megs it triggers the "phone storage low" messages, and soon thereafter the phone essentially becomes non-functioning. the problem is that as far as i can tell, there's no way to reduce the file size of this HTC mail app once this process has started. i've deleted every shred of email, all inboxes, all sent, all trash all everything from every mail folder for every account - no reduction in app size. then i set about actually deleting the email accounts themselves one by one - no reduction in app size.

i trashed every shred of email from the system, and the HTC mail app still hovered around 110megs (and the phone storage low indicators continuing). after researching the issue online and piecing 2+2 together i realized that the only solution is to wipe the phone. the issue there is that there are no guarantees that the issue wouldn't resurface again (actually it's quite likely).

so after wiping the phone last night, i did NOT setup HTC mail, but rather switched to K9 (just using gmail exclusively is also an option). so far zero issues. obviously 12 hours or so is too small a sample size to make definitive conclusions, but after all of the research i've done i'm confident the "phone storage is getting low" errors will not return.

bottom line: HTC mail seems to have a very significant memory leak or bug that causes it to blow through its allocated memory at an alarming pace, and there is very little that can be done to stop it once it's started. i would strongly recommend to those of you with the above issues to NOT use HTC mail after wiping the phone...

EDIT: oh, one small added bonus- after wiping the phone, google earth appears in the android market

 

[buckifvr]

I've had my Incredible for about the same amount of time, and I haven't noticed an issue with HTC mail.

 

[indianajonze]

yeah a lot of people havent. but a lot of people have as well. are you using HTC mail with pop3 accounts exclusively? how many? also, what is your HTC mail file size right now?

 

[VZWBB]

I have comcast and yahoo mail set up on my phone, it seems like they are handled by the htc mail process. The total size of my htc mail is 1.96 mb, out of which 1.9 mb is just data I guess. The cache size says 60.00 kb, so the numbers seem to add up.

I have yet to receive any email on yahoo, but i hardly use yahoo. Comcast, I get one or two emails every other day or so, so minimal usage. Do you use more?

I'm just wondering if this is happening to a specific set of phones or across the board (assuming higher usage than me).

 

[socal sxt]

There is already a thread about this problem, I had 2 pop email accounts and I wiped the phone and now have those accounts going to my gmail and I only have the gmail account now active on the phone. I will see if this stops the problem.

 

[rpfarrah]

yeah a lot of people havent. but a lot of people have as well. are you using HTC mail with pop3 accounts exclusively? how many? also, what is your HTC mail file size right now?

How do you check the file size?

 

[indianajonze]

settings-applications-manage applications-then you can either view manually or sort by size. you may have to wait a few seconds for it to calculate file sizes

 

[indianajonze]

There is already a thread about this problem, I had 2 pop email accounts and I wiped the phone and now have those accounts going to my gmail and I only have the gmail account now active on the phone. I will see if this stops the problem.

this thread is about what i believe is a specific issue with the htc mail application. the phone storage low issue (which is what that other thread is about) is a symptom of that. so i thought it was a different thread topic

 

[rpfarrah]

About 40 MB with just one POP account plus gmail. After I cleared my email (which I do regularly) I had the same. Then I cleared the folders: Sent, Trash, Drafts. Still had 15 MB. Cleared the cache and I still have 8.29 MB.

Hmmmmmmmm.

 

[indianajonze]

gmail is a separate app. the htc mail app just handles pop, imap and exchange.

 

[msm_portata]

I have an Exchange account with a lot of mail and folders. My Mail size is 109 MB which is understandable, but what I do not get is that in Settings => SD Card & phone storage, the internal phone storage is 6.6 GB with 6.0 GB free and the phone memory is 748 MB with 666 MB available. Why am I getting the low memory warning if I have a lot still available?

 

[krelvinaz]

I've never seen this error...

The "phone storage space is getting low" error is saying that the phones "Phone Memory" is getting low.

This is not the external SDcard memory card.

This is not the Internal Storage Memory (something that only the Droid Incredible has, so far).

It is the Phone memory that is indicated below that is seen in Menu > Settings > SD Card & phone storage:

That memory is the only memory used by Android to store apps. By default, the Market, browser and some other apps use that storage for cache. Many of those can be redirected to the SDCard. Some to the SDcard or the internal storage.

However, You are indicating that your free space there was still 666mb which would still be a lot of memory though which is strange.

I have near the same amount free. I wonder if there is something that is temporarily using a lot of memory during say a sync that is using up a lot of space.

Do you have your attachments being stored there (think that is the default location)

Mail > Menu > More > Settings > General Settings:

I think you would notice it, but perhaps you have a very large attachment that is eating memory during a sync? It would make for very long pause though.

Have you turned your phone on/off?

 

[indianajonze]

I have an Exchange account with a lot of mail and folders. My Mail size is 109 MB which is understandable, but what I do not get is that in Settings => SD Card & phone storage, the internal phone storage is 6.6 GB with 6.0 GB free and the phone memory is 748 MB with 666 MB available. Why am I getting the low memory warning if I have a lot still available?

see my original post. i am now 100% convinced that the htc mail app is the cause of this problem. after 2 full days now my k9 mail is holding steady at 7 megs, and the unused htc mail app is holding steady at 1.07 megs. with the identical setup last week (same pop3 email accts sync'd), the htc mail app was already at 86 megs after 2 days before i got the errors and had to wipe.

try this - i defy you to try to reduce that 109 meg file size. you might get it down a few megs here and there, but otherwise you're screwed. there's no way to reduce the size enough to stop the error from happening. after a day or so of the "phone storage low" error, the phone will begin to lock up regularly. after that the phone will be unusable.

please keep us posted here on what you find out

 

[doctorg23]

I am still waiting for my phone to arrive, but this has me a little worried.

Should I just avoid setting up my email through the HTC mail app??

Is there an alternative other than using the Gmail forwarding thing (I get so many emails that I need to be able to delete off my actual server using the imap account)??

 

[socal sxt]

Send your pop emails to your gmail, your will get your emails faster and use less battery according to Verizon and you also have one inbox. The only way to clear this notice is to do a factory reset I had to do it twice before I switched to using the gmail push. So far I have not received the phone and memory low notice, but it has not been a full week yet.

 

[krelvinaz]

I have been using the mail app for exchange mail along with k-9 for several pop accounts IMAP and gmail since I got my phone on 4/29 without ever seeing that error.

I am a heavy email user for both work and pleasure. There are few I know that get more email than I do.

 

[indianajonze]

Send your pop emails to your gmail, your will get your emails faster and use less battery according to Verizon and you also have one inbox. The only way to clear this notice is to do a factory reset I had to do it twice before I switched to using the gmail push. So far I have not received the phone and memory low notice, but it has not been a full week yet.

yeah verizon is wrong. sending pop through gmail is slower than mail coming from a horse drawn carriage. google only polls pop accounts every hour, with no way to change it. best bet is k9. you can set it to check for email whenever you want (i have it set for every 10 minutes)

 

[TucsonChuck]

Just using the gmail account, has that made a difference? I'm getting ready to re-set my phone for a second day in a row..

My phone shows
Internal phone storage total 6.6 gb 6.5 avail
phone memory 748 total 700mb aval

HTC mail the issue?

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[TucsonChuck]

My update after talking to Verizon, and then to HTC.

It looks like they, both Verizon and HTC, have no clue what the issue is with the low storage message... HTC requested that I re-set my phone and add email accounts and apps over a period of days and see when the issue comes up again. I guess that I am going to do the diagnostics. If you haven't call yet i would suggest you do so HTC can look into it themselves.

After I re-set my phone the Internal phone storage show 6.6 gb total 6.5 aval The same before I re-set the phone

Phone memory 748 total 719 aval

Set up my Google account and Google maps and the phone memory went to 748 total 711 aval

I set the camera to save pictures to the SD card
and because I am not setting up my other email accounts I am using Google to import them.

Before I re-set my phone I have Five email accounts "installed"

Google
Hotmail
Yahoo
Cox
Work(Exchange)

The Only Apps I had "Installed" after my re-set yesterday

Peep
Google maps
Google Skymap
Compass - Snapic
Barcode Scanner- ZXing Team
ShopSavvy- Big in japan, Inc

That's all i can remember... Probably all

So to recap I only installed Google mail and Google Maps today, tomorrow I will add something else... I'm to impatient to be a scientist...

Can anyone add their findings? Suggestions?

Thanks

Chuck

 

[DigitalGuru]

I just started having this issue last night. So far it hasn't made my phone inoperable yet, just slower. I did send a service request to HTC so hopefully I hear something. If I do, I'll post it here. Anyone have any work arounds besides a factory wipe and not using HTC Mail?