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Comment by kessler | Hacker News Reader

This is a great breakdown, thanks. Now can you explain why so often I receive an email on the iPhone and one of two things happens:

1. I'm not in MobileMail.app, get a notification that an email arrives, but when I enter the app, nothing is there. When I manually hit the refresh mail button, the new message downloads and appears.

2. If I'm in MobileMail.app a new email arrives and I see it up top for a few seconds, and instantly it disappears. Again, I have to tap refresh to re-download the message.

Why does this happen?

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1. I'm not in MobileMail.app, get a notification that an email arrives, but when I enter the app, nothing is there. When I manually hit the refresh mail button, the new message downloads and appears.

Your iPhone is connected to a push server; the server sends your phone a few bytes that indicate a new message is available to be downloaded, but it does not begin downloading the message itself until you enter MobileMail.app. (Messages.app is different since your carrier pushes messages in their entirety).

I have the exact same issue - I use gmail and IMAP with iPhone3G.

You should try gmail + ActiveSync push. Made the leap a week ago, and the whole mail experience feels a lot smoother.

Beware, it tends to burn up your battery a bit quicker as well.

Come on man. What does this have to do with the article? In any case, I have had no such problems with my iphones, so I'd say you either got a faulty unit or maybe it's a service provider issue.

I think it's somewhat relevant since the article discusses incoming mail handling in MobileMail.app. And obviously it's not a hardware issue or 'faulty unit' as you say. It's a well documented issue.

What does this (potentially rare [0]) bug have to do with the article? Why should the author of the article be able to know the reason for this bug? Why are you asking that question here?

[0] I personally never encountered it.

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