changes in connectivity not handled very gracefully

[Wolfgang Breyha]

Hi!

If my phone changes connectivity while accessing the servers r2mail does not handle this situation very gracefully. Sometimes it gets completely stuck complaining about unreachable/inaccessible servers until shut down and restarted. Or today I had a warning that the folder is opened in read only mode.

This happens mostly if mobile data is active and the phone changes to WLAN or back to mobile data while r2mail accesses the servers.

For the usual workflow... unlocking the phone, opening r2mail, "get mail" ... I often reach exactly the point when WLAN gets connected (since I'm using GreenPower as a Juice Defender replacement), On larger WLANs like eduroam you often get disconnected to "convince" your device to move to another AP or frequency as well.

Greetings,
Wolfgang

[Stefan Selbitschka]

Hi,

as soon as Android fires the network change event, R2Mail2 stops ongoing actions and restart all background services after 10 seconds. The delay is needed since if the phone is on the edge of your wifi connection it could happen that the network switches multiple time in short time.

But if you are have an ongoing connection and the network changes the connection simply aborts and you get an error, most likely a timeout message. Now one could argue that the app should handle such network state changes but its nearly impossible to distinguish between an error during connection loss or real timeout because the server is down. Furthermore I think the user should be informed about such changes. Imaging you are downloading a large email 50mb and your phone is switching from wifi to cellular connection. Should R2Mail2 restart the download automatically and drain your data plan? I don't think so.

I agree with you that in some situation, i.e. during a simple mailcheck a simpler error message or a retry logic could be implemented but not in general.

regards
stefan