wnd's weblog

N810 and built-in e-mail client

My and my curiosity. Sigh. When I was told the built-in email-client on N770 was bad, I should have believed them. Instead, I wanted to believe there would have been progress since then, and wanted to experience N810 e-mail client myself. Bad move.

The first impression was "OK". I didn't like how the thing looked, but settings up an account with GMail was straightforward. It started retreaving the headers -- all 5000 of them -- so I just waited. Once receiving headers was finished I scrolled down and doubletapped on one of the emails. Scrolling was horribly slow but I figured 5000 entries in the list would explain it.

After tapping one of the emails a new window opened, showing nothing but the header information. After a few minutes of waiting I still didn't have the message body. I closed the window and concluded that the client was not suitable to be used with GMail. I opened Accounts dialog and clicked "Delete". I confirmed the deletion and waited. And I waited. Switching to desktop and back to e-mail client gave a clear indication that the device was busy doing something. I didn't know what it was and at this point I didn't care much. After five minutes of waiting, the dialog was still there, all buttons disabled. I killed the client from X-Term and tried to restart E-mail. Nothing happened. Oh great, did I just manage to break this?

I rebooted the device and tried again. Now E-mail would start and there was nothing in Inbox. I quit the client and continued to try different application. A few minutes later the device started blinking the LED and gave an indication I had new E-mail. Huh, how? I had just deleted the account, right?

I opened the E-mail client and suddenly my Inbox was filled with my GMail e-mails. I tried to open the Accounts dialog again but with no success. I tried and tried, but nothing happened. top showed enprocess was consuming all the CPU time so I killed it. Soon after the E-mail client popped a generic error dialog like "Error occured" and died. I restarted the E-mail client and enprocess with it. Nothing had changed.

Finally I decided there was little to lose so I opened an X-Term, cdd to ~/apps/email/Main/Inbox and deleted everything. I restarted E-mail, canceled connection to GMail and finally managed to open Accounts dialog and delete the GMail account. My E-mail experience was finally over.