C500 - POP3 mail - displays wrong mail - firmware problem

[Guest johnequinox]

Dear Newsgroup

Here's another bizarre bug report for the C500 phone.

After having all sorts of problems getting an IMAP mail account to work and failing dismally because the phone hangs when disconnecting, I decided to go down the POP3 route instead.

So, our It Department set up a standard POP3 mail account and set up the phone to retrieve mail from it. I set it to download 'Headers only' in order to reduce the bandwidth as I have a lot of mail every day but a lot of it is junk. Our server automatically labels any spam mails with '[spam]' in the subject line so if I see any of these I just delete them.

Anyway, I decided to try this solution out on a business trip this week. All worked well for the first day and then I hit a bizarre problem.

- Opened POP3 mailbox

- Selected

--> phone went and retrieved all the headers - worked OK !

- I then went through the mail and deleted all the mails marked with 'SPAM'.

- I then went to a 'real' mail from a customer and opened it. It displayed the mail as an attachment so I selected to download the attachment.

- The phone then connects again to download the mail. However, when the mail appeared it was one of the SPAM mails I had previously deleted !

- If I quit out of the mail and go back to looking at the headers again, the header is correct displaying the correct sender and subject information.

- If I then re-open the mail it opens as one of the SPAM mails that i had previously deleted. Even the sender and subject are from the SPAM mail, not the mail I have actually opened.

So, it looks like there is some weird problem going on here where if you delete a mail, the phone gets confused and actually indexes to the wrong mail in the list. The problem is completely repeatable and I've left a couple of mails which exhibit the problem on my phone in case anyone needs me to debug it further.

Has anyone else seen this problem ?

Just to prove this wasn't a POP3 mail box problem, I set up Outlook Express on my PC today to read the same POP3 mail from the same account and it all worked perfectly. The offending mails opened perfectly in Outlook Express. So, the problem is with the C500 firmware and would potentially affect anyone doing POP3 mail. I'm not sure why POP3 worked OK for a day and then I hit the problem. It could be a problem when you download mails after deleting mails but I'm sure it will be easy to find the problem if the softy can take a look at it.

I am just about to give up on the C500 now as it definitely doesn't work with IMAP mail and POP3 mail sort of works, but exhibits this strange behaviour. This all stinks of badly tested firmware which is full of bugs. What's worse is that there doesn't appear to be any formal way of reporting bugs which is really annoying as this would be a good way of giving feedback to the manufacturer to fix the problems.

My advice...

Look long and hard at the C500 throught the window of the shop, but leave it a few months before buying it to give them time to fix all the bugs ! It really just isn't quite there yet.

I would welcome any comments on this subject as obviously POP3 is very popular. Orange told me to ring Microsoft to report the problem at which point I gave up !

best regards

John

[Guest chucky.egg]

Yeah, this is a known problem

In the tests I've done it seems OK if you do another send/receive aftrer you've deleted the spam emails and BEFORE you download the full email.

I've changed the way my mail accounts handle spam (diverting them to another mailbox), and now I just download the full email on my main mailbox.