Blank Yahoo emails in HTC email

[anon(59657)]

I'm having two problems with my Yahoo email with the HTC mail program. The first is that it never actually syncs deletions or read/unread status with the server, but that's covered by a bunch of other threads already. (I have not yet tried the workaround in those threads of manually setting up the account by entering the imap server info directly rather than selecting "yahoo" from the "add account" function.)

The second is new, and it started about 2 days ago. About 1/4 of my new emails are displaying as blank. I say that it is "displaying" as blank because if, from the phone, I forward the email to myself, it fowards it as a .msg attachment, and when I get the fwded msg, I can open the .msg attachment and read the original email. All within the HTC mail program on my phone.

This blankness only affects the message in the HTC Mail program. If I access my yahoo email from a web browser on a PC, it displays just fine. I haven't found any pattern to which emails are blank - I have one person who sends me 2-3 emails a day, and some are now blank and some are not. Some blank emails are HTML format, some are not.

I note a similar report on the HTC EVO 4G http://forums.androidcentral.com/showthread.php?t=55692, but the workaround for that of stopping the email, clearing data and cache, deleting the account, then re-adding the account has not worked. First, neither clear cache nor clear data appears to be enabled on the HTC mail program on the Rezound. Second, deleting the account, then re-adding it caused it to redownload all my mail, and the exact same messages came through blank again.

Is K-9 mail going to be my fix?

 

[anon(59657)]

Since posting this, I tried the workaround for the sync issue of removing the yahoo account from HTC mail and then doing a new account -> manual setup using yahoo's published imap settings. This appears to have fixed both the sync issue and the blank email issue.

Some things you lose with manually setting up a yahoo account vs. using their automatic setup:

• Push email. Only periodic polling is supported.
• The "yahoo" icon notification for new mail. You get a generic envelope notification icon.

I wonder if there's a problem with the way push email is implemented for yahoo. I don't think yahoo itself actually supports push email, so maybe there's an HTC server somewhere that's acting as an intermediate, and that server has sync issues. Just guessing, though.

 

[MrSmith317]

It's actually Yahoo, not you. They suggest you use the Yahoo Mail app, although I've heard of some success with K-9 and Enhanced Email.

 

[snoopygsx]

I have been experiencing the same issue the past few days. On some emails the text will be visible for only a few seconds and then go blank, with no way to retrieve the text without logging into Yahoo mail via the internet browser or on my PC.

This is happening using the HTC mail application on my HTC Evo 3D device. I have deleted and reinstalled the Yahoo accounts, modified the settings, and even cleared out the mail application to no avail.

Do you mind sharing the IMAP settings you used, or forward me to the site you used for reference? The settings I have found online are for a paid Yahoo account (Yahoo Plus, I think) and I am merely using the free version of Yahoo mail.

Thank you.

 

[anon(59657)]

The settings I used for my free yahoo account I got from here:
Setting up IMAP on your mobile device | Yahoo! Mobile Help

This'll give you imap email access from a mobile device. Yahoo is pretty good about telling if it's really a mobile device or if you're trying to get sneaky and setting up your Outlook Express on your PC to use the imap service because they want you to pay the $20/yr for Yahoo Plus in order to use a desktop mail client with POP or imap.

In response to MrSmith317 - on the HTC EVO 4G forum, this problem has been reported on both Yahoo and on AOL email, so I don't think it's actually Yahoo's fault directly. Though I must admit I find Yahoo's email to be remarkably unreliable these days. I also never experienced the problems using K9 mail on my OG Droid. The problems appeared when I upgraded to a Rezound and started using HTC's email app.

 

[anon(59657)]

The walkthrough for this would be:

• Open HTC Mail app
• Menu -> ... -> New Account
• Other (POP3/IMAP)
• Enter your email and password then press the "Manual setup" button, not the "Next" button
• Enter the info from the yahoo directions linked in the previous post for "incoming server" -> for username use your entire email address
• It'll "test" your settings. If you did it right, it'll ask for your outgoing settings.
• Yahoo says for outgoing, it requires SSL/TLS. You get to pick either one, since you can't specify both. I used SSL and it works fine.
• It'll "test" the outgoing settings. If you did it right, it'll ask you to give a name to the account and check a box if you want to make it the default. Then, you're done.

 

[TheScrape]

Tried the reset to the account and e-mails that did not load at all loaded...for 5 seconds.

From what I can tell, there is some kinda script infecting the app from Yahoo! that trys to place a "news" link at the bottom of the email. Sometimes it reconfigures the e-mail and places the link within the graphic of the email itself! I have complained to Yahoo! since it plainly states "Powered by Yahoo!" in the thing. They are calling it Today (beta). Well, if its a Beta, let me opt out of it. And how DARE they put something in my e-mail that i essentially an advertisement. This has hurt the ability for me to do my work from the road. E-mail is personal.

I figured this out because, if you look at the bottom of your e-mails, there is the "Today" box with the link. If you scroll down quick, you can see the browser try to load it an choke as it redirects to Yahoo to get the link. I've managed to catch the download and stop it by pressing the gray bar with the stopwatch in it. It usually says "2k left to load" or something like that. When my e-mail has disappeared, it is when this "virus" is trying to load. This just started happening when this "today" thing started appearing on my e-mail. Can't figure out where it came from (no update that I am aware of).

I have contacted Yahoo! Mobile, but they have not as of yet replied. The e-mail said their volumeis very high with tech issues, This is probably why. About ready to switch back to my old reliable Blackberry from the Android POS with this issue, all the freaking ads, and the Carrier IQ stuff.

 

[anon(59657)]

Oh, geeze, you're right. I can make any email disappear by scrolling to the bottom of it, which triggers it to download something. I can kinda fix this by disabling auto-download:

From inside the mail app:

• menu -> ... -> settings
• Send & Receive
• Uncheck "Auto download message"

So far, which is by no means exhaustive, I've noticed that every message now has a "Get remaining (2K)" at the bottom, and it's the downloading of that 2K that makes the message go blank. I worry that this workaround is going to make it impossible to download long emails, though.

The place to submit a complaint to yahoo appears to be the "Yahoo! Mobile Support Form" on this page:
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mobile/forms_index.html

Over in the phandroid forums, they're reporting the same problem on Thunderbolt with K9 mail being fine. So we've got Rezound, EVO 3D, EVO 4G, and Thunderbolt now all experiencing the problem with the native HTC email app. I filed a ticket with HTC in addition to yahoo. Maybe you should, too.
https://forums.androidcentral.com/e...Fwww.htc.com%2Fus%2Fsupport%2F&token=B1ZNXt4f

To be fair to yahoo, they're desperately running out of cash, so if they're trying to make some money by putting ads on a service they supply to me for free, that's OK. After all, darn near every free app in the market is ad-supported. But they need to do it in a way that doesn't wreck functionality.

 

[snoopygsx]

It has been frustrating trying to figure out this issue, and I appreciate everyone sharing their experience. Thank you, bscherka, for the detailed information. I have disabled the 'auto download message' until a more permanent fix is found, and so far it seems to be working.

 

[anon(59657)]

Got my response from HTC. It's the kind of generic response you'd expect from a company that is pretty sure the problem is someone else's:

We certainly understand your concerns with the Yahoo email on your HTC device. We will document your concerns with email function after Yahoo’s change to their service. However, we cannot guarantee that any changes will be made to the email client.

Yahoo has previously stated that they do not support direct access to their email servers through the native mail applications on the Android operating system. To work around this, you can access the Android Market and download the Yahoo! Mail application. Yahoo! Inc. itself released this application so that their users can still access their accounts without having to go through the web browser on the phone.
​

 

[anon(59657)]

Did they fix it? I've applied the disabling "auto download messages" workaround, but every now and then on an email I've read and don't care about, I've been hitting the download button on the remaining 2K. As of this morning, if I download that extra 2K, all I get is the "Today (Beta)" ad, and the email does not go blank.

Anyone else see this?

 

[asnigro]

Me, my mother and some other family are all having the same problem for about 2 weeks now.

 

[putney1477]

I've had the same exact problems, I thought it was me. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one. I'm going to try the workaround and see what happens.

Sent from my Rezound

 

[cbarth3]

My wife uses yahoo as her primary email and has started seeing this on her EVO Design 4G. I have not seen this issue on my rooted EVO 4G. Going to try the manual settings listed here on hers. Looking at my phone the only difference is the servers have android at the beginning like so android.****.mail.yahoo.com **** for either server imap or smtp

 

[anon(59657)]

Yahoo keeps up their tradition of being remarkably unhelpful in their response to my trouble ticket:

I understand that when you attempt to access your Yahoo! Mail account,
you are prompted to download the Yahoo! Mail app and you are unable to
bypass the prompt. I apologize for the inconvenience this issue has
caused.

Our Engineering team is already working on the resolution now, and we
intend to have it corrected as soon as possible. The ticket number for
this issue is 5240173.

I appreciate your patience while we correct the issue.​

At least, I think that's unhelpful. I didn't report anything about being prompted to download the Yahoo mail app.

Yahoo seems to have been more direct in their answer to the fellow with the same problem on a Thunderbolt over here:
Emails not coming to phone - Android Forums

Yahoo! has added the best of the web content to the bottom of your email messages. This will allow you to conveniently see trending topics while you are reading your email on your mobile device.

By adding the best of the web content to the bottom of your email this allows Yahoo! to continue to provide a free, top notch email product.

The best of the web content may appear if you have a free Yahoo! Mail account and are also checking your free mail account using IMAP. Unfortunately, this cannot be disabled.

If you have a Yahoo! Mail Plus account and are using IMAP, this content snippet will not appear.​

The "fix" is to pay $20/yr for Yahoo Mail Plus service.

 

[clemarr]

It's actually Yahoo, not you. They suggest you use the Yahoo Mail app, although I've heard of some success with K-9 and Enhanced Email.

Thanks for the tip. I downloaded the Yahoo Mail app from the market and that fixed my problem. I like it better the the HTC mail.

 

[D850]

I am not getting any new yahoo emails now and I have spoken with htc support and they say it is caused by yahoo constantly changing their server settings. Very frustating!

 

[ToddAtAndroid]

Here is what I've found:

1. Yahoo is appending their TODAY (Beta) information on some email, not all. (yet) But the frequency seams to be increasing.
2. Those appended to with a properly crafted URL (includes http://....) in the TODAY (Beta) section are viewable with the phone OK.
3. Those appended to with an IMPROPERLY crafted URL (includes ttp://....) are NOT viewable with the phone. Seems the phone cannot process that info with a missing 'h'.

Because this is Yahoo's beta, the Yahoo Beta team doesn't have their coding written to the point it's reliable yet and we are seeing the affects of this - hence the missing 'h' in the URL.

You can verify this by creating a IMAP connection to the same Yahoo servers you have on your phone via Outlook Express. When you do this, you can clearly see the good and bad appendages at the bottom of the email that they are injecting into the body. Trying this from the WEB browser will not work because they are not being injected since the connection isn't occurring via IMAP. This is clearly Yahoo's attempt at generating more revenue via Ads and they realize less people are coming in from the tradition WEB site with all the adds around the borders.

It seems the K-9 Mail client is able to overcome the malformed URL at the bottom and still works vs. the built in Android mail client cannot.

I've been able help mitigate about 75-90% of the problems is by deselecting the option to "Auto download message" in the mail client Settings>Send & Receive. This causes the body of the email to show a "Get remaining (2K)" link at the bottom of the the email body. But it's not 100% that it will work as the phone sometimes still automatically processes the bad URL, which causes the phone to blank out the body of the email.

I've also contact HTC and Yahoo, but essentially HTC's response was to contact AT&T (my carrier since the carriers decide what goes on the phone via default apps). Yahoo hasn't responded to my support issue about their Beta not generating complete URL's.

So for me, I've removed the Auto download message within the Android mail client, installed K-9 (but not syncing and disable all notification and set to manually sync at my command) and then only use K-9 when I find that I have an email that's processing the bad URL crafted Yahoo Today Beta crap at the bottom. I do this because I do like using the built in Android Mail app.

Hope this helps.

Todd

 

[alphasigmookie]

Glad to hear I'm not the only one with this issue. Posted about it earlier today. I'm just using the Y! mail app for now and I think I like it better than the stock one anyway.

 

[marcjac]

I started having the same problem myself this week. Not sure what happened that would've caused this, but it's rather frustrating to open an email only to see a blank page! I had the "get remaining 2k" message on one email, I clicked on it and ever since then about 1/2 of my emails are blank. I also don't see the option to disable "auto download message" under my send/receive settings. I'll try K9 or the Yahoo mail app in the meantime. Can't afford NOT to see emails! Thanks to all for your suggestions.