Flaky IMAP may suck iPhone’s battery life
Reader John wrote in to tell us of a problem he (and others) are experiencing with the iPhone's battery going dead very rapidly.
Dissatisfied, John decided to do a little detective work and found that the culprit on his phone is an errant IMAP connection. Apparently, in some circumstances the iPhone's Mail client may not correctly terminate the conversation with an IMAP server.
Because the iPhone is continously sending commands, the mail server will not consider the connection idle and time it out, as far as the mail server is concerned they are all legitimate requests. Because the iPhone is continously sending commands, the iPhone WiFi (or EDGE) transmitter is constantly working and therefore constantly draining the battery. This also explains why the iPhone gets very hot (because it is working flat out).John's experience has been in particular with a Kerio Mail Server and a QuickMail Pro server; though he says he had the same problem trying to access GMail over IMAP with the 1.1.3 firmware, that seems to be working for him on 1.1.4.
My initial hypothesis would be some sort of incompatibility between QuickMail Pro/Kerio Mail and the iPhone's IMAP client, since I've got a variety of IMAP clients set up on my iPhone (Yahoo, Gmail, .Mac, and a couple of my own), and haven't run into this problem at all.
How about it readers: experienced excessive battery-draining that can be traced back to IMAP? Sound off below.
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