iPhone Mail Sucks
Posted January 20th, 2008 @ 11:50am by Erik J. Barzeski
I've been using iPhone's Mail application on this trip (I didn't want to bring along a computer), and I must say, I'm rather disappointed in its behavior. It largely boils down to the fact that deleting messages is an incredible pain in the ass. If the app supported spam filtering (or even some basic filters), I probably wouldn't have a single complaint, but without spam filtering I do.
At the very least, I want a method of mass selecting blocks of messages to delete. Going one-by-one is frustrating, and oftentimes over EDGE you'll get warnings that messages couldn't be moved to the trash, and that you have to delete them all over again. Lovely.
Every deletion requires either two motions (tap/tap or swipe/tap) or a waiting through a long "suck" animation if you choose to hit the trash icon to delete.
Yes, the answer could very well be "filter on the server side," but that's not always feasible. In my case, I turned off SpamAssassin on the server side because it was becoming increasingly ineffective.
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Posted 22 Jan 2008 at 1:24pm #
My solution was to use IMAP instead of POP, and then leave my home computer running with SpamSieve (which I love). This way my home computer filters out my spam (just moves it to the Spam folder), and I never see it on my iPhone.
Posted 22 Jan 2008 at 1:42pm #
Dave: yeah, that'd work. I still prefer POP for some crazy reason (mostly because I hate dealing with a 14 inboxes + other folders).
Posted 22 Jan 2008 at 7:16pm #
I'd agree, the suck animation is too godawfulslow. I wish it could be turned off for good.
Posted 22 Jan 2008 at 7:37pm #
Hopefully Apple works out the issues with the IMAP IDLE command. That's currently my only complaint (not yet an iPhone user, soon though, soon).
Posted 23 Jan 2008 at 2:45am #
Were you running SpamAssassin with Bayesian filtering and Razor2/DCC on? Bayesian filtering can make a significant difference if you weren't using it.
Posted 23 Jan 2008 at 9:37am #
[quote comment="45466"]Were you running SpamAssassin with Bayesian filtering and Razor2/DCC on? Bayesian filtering can make a significant difference if you weren't using it.[/quote]
I wasn't running it with those things turned on, no. I've since re-enabled it and it seems to be working quite effectively as it is now.
Posted 14 Apr 2008 at 5:51pm #
iPhone mail sucks.!!! For many reasons..
1) its slow, really slow. I can check my email faster over the web browser on the edge network faster than wait for the spinning wheel to tell me I have mail.
2) if you have an attachment it trys to down load instead of listing attatchment size with an option to down load. Also it does not promt you about deatils on email or how long its going to take to download, you just sit there and wait.. With no idea on what is going on..
3) after deleting emails it downloads them again.. I hate this.. Its so hard to delete emails why do it over and over? Makes no sense.. Its hard to talk about..
There are some mant more reasons. The only reason i havenrhe iphone is because its the only phone with a real web browser.. But then again no flash or .mov is a problem. My pc phones were far better just that surfering the web was a pain.. Iphone works, iphone mail sucks..