Contents Of Inbox Keep Coming And Going On iPhone 3GS

A fix for the problem that has been identified as causing these symptoms has been deployed.

Alas my one did it again today when I tried to delete a message.

Contents when they returned did not match my live gmail box

I shall try the GSynch for a while to see if that is any more reliable...

There's something very strange going on with your device's sync.

There's no record of the service having initiated a resync since the fix was deployed.
The phone appears to be resyncing all on its own.

I believe I found the operation you mentioned (06:33 pacific time).
The device went:

06:33:48 Device sends move message to trash command.
06:33:50 Service tries to move message at Google, but it had already been deleted, so service responded with success to device.
06:33:51 Device send a resync command on the inbox.

Have you updated your iPhone firmware recently ?

On a second look, I see something a little strange about the response from the service to the move command.
We're checking to see if that could have upset the phone, causing it to resync.

I've been having this same issue for the past week or so and it just re-synced again this morning. Now nothing in my inbox.

Check that the messages you're expecting to see in the inbox aren't older than the "days to sync" setting.
Usually older messages will be left on the phone for a while, but they aren't re-fetched on a resync.

dboreham wrote:On a second look, I see something a little strange about the response from the service to the move command.
We're checking to see if that could have upset the phone, causing it to resync.

After some detailed investigation we don't see any problems with the services response to the device.
So at present this incident is in the category of unexplained strange device behavior.

dboreham wrote:Check that the messages you're expecting to see in the inbox aren't older than the "days to sync" setting.
Usually older messages will be left on the phone for a while, but they aren't re-fetched on a resync.

They were not older than the sync period. I deleted the account and re-added it and that cleared it up, but was sort of a hassle to have to do.

jalm1 wrote:
They were not older than the sync period. I deleted the account and re-added it and that cleared it up, but was sort of a hassle to have to do.

You can trigger a resync from our web site (easier than deleting and re-adding the account) from the "Check my devices" page.
I did some checking on your account but we didn't have logging enabled so we don't have the detailed history to analyze.
Logging has been enabled on your account now so if it happens again we'll know why.

I can't remember seeing a case where the wrong set of messages was on the device after resync so this is something we'd really like to get to the bottom of. The most obvious cause I can think of would be some connectivity problem that led to the phone missing the later messages fetched in the resync. Normally the phone would display a "Can't connect..." error in that situation though.

I tried the new gsync but that is poor and does not even get the character set correct

Thus reset on NuevaSynch - fimgers crossed.

To confirm my phone is a standard 3G 'S' and is not jail broken and is running Apple's latest o/s 3.1.2 (7D11)

I am having the symptom now, too. On Monday and today. The iPhone (3G) goes in a resync loop, and the battery drains in a couple of hours.
I also have a suspicion of what triggers the behavior. Both times this happened I had left Thunderbird running on my home PC and started another Thunderbird at work. I suspect that then there were too many imap connections to gmail (app account) causing the nuevasync server to not be able to connect to google's imap server. Simply terminating the Thunderbird clients does not bring the iPhone out of the resync loop.

Just a quick status update on this issue : we suspect that there may be more than one cause for the iPhone white inbox syndrome.
We've been able to gather log data from a few affected accounts, and we've also seen it happen once on a test device here.
So although the problem isn't yet fixed, we'll likely have it properly diagnosed in the next day or two.

jostd wrote:I am having the symptom now, too. On Monday and today. The iPhone (3G) goes in a resync loop, and the battery drains in a couple of hours.
I also have a suspicion of what triggers the behavior. Both times this happened I had left Thunderbird running on my home PC and started another Thunderbird at work. I suspect that then there were too many imap connections to gmail (app account) causing the nuevasync server to not be able to connect to google's imap server. Simply terminating the Thunderbird clients does not bring the iPhone out of the resync loop.

Hmm...this particular error condition shouldn't lead to a resync, but I wonder if it does now (there was a code change in this area a couple of weeks ago).
What's your username ? We can check to see if you had the IMAP error / resync as cause and effect (provided it happened in the last day or two).

However, we do know that this isn't the primary cause for the iPhone resyncing email spontaneously -- we've analyzed the trace data for a number of
occurrences and none of those had this problem (the device just initiated the resync out of the blue).

We've deployed new code that contains countermeasures for the iPhone spontaneous resyncing syndrome.
It will be a while before we know for sure if it has fixed the problem because we need to wait for a few
devices to exhibit the resyncing syndrome (it can't be reliably reproduced in the lab).

We had a test device sent the bogus resync request last night and the service ignored it as designed.
The device carried on syncing subsequently, so it looks like this change has fixed this particular problem
(although nobody was looking at the device when it did this at 2am, so it's always possible the device
itself did something strange -- but based on the log data for its sync activity, there was no resync done).