PreCentral: Fix email retention time issues

[News Reporter]

This tip is only for devices running webOS 2.x or higher

Instead of a fixed number of email messages to load into the Email app, webOS allows you to define a

link hidden, please login to view

, so you can bring it all email from just the last day to a full month to everything in your mailbox.  Generally, the app will follow the timeframe that you have set and only bring in those requested emails, but there are a few situations where this functionality becomes broken and requires a little intervention to fix.

The most common occurrence of this is when you change the retention timeframe. If you increase the time, then the next email refresh will simply bring in those additional emails. However, if you decrease the timeframe of emails to sync, the app does not always recognize the change and keeps all those emails that were already synced.  Other than waiting for the app to hopefully fix itself over time, the easiest way to fix this to remove and add back the email account.  To do this:

1. Open up the and find the Account with your email
2. DO NOT tap the "Remove Account" button.
3. Instead, flip the "Email" toggle from ON to OFF and you will get a dashboard notification that your email acount and data will be deleted. Ignore the warning
4. to return to your Accounts listing
5. Go back to the email's Account again and now switch the toggle from OFF back to ON.
6. By doing this, all of the things tied to that Account--such as any or calendars--will remain untouched, and any email account settings prior to removing the email will also remain.

Another situation where we have seen the email retention timeframe fail occurred to this writer this past weekend. Every few minutes, the phone would vibrate telling me there were new emails, but nothing seemed to come through. In fact, the "new" emails that were being synced were actually very old emails, some that were from days or weeks before the defined email retention timeframe and no matter how many times I seemed to delete those older emails, they kept returning every few minutes. As it turns out, I had accidently deleted an older email while on my PC and then moved that file from the Trash back to the Inbox. For some reason, the webOS app must have been confused between the older date of the email and the more recent "modified" date of when I moved the file back into my inbox. From my computer, I moved that problem-email to a different folder in my email account to get it out of my inbox, and then be safe followed the directions above to remove and re-add my email account and everything was fixed!