E-mail sync settings, high battery usage

Hi,

I have a question regarding email synchronization. If I send an email to my e.email address I immediately (2-3 seconds) receive a notification on my phone.
I tried to modify the sync-frequency in the email-app and even set it to manual sync and disabled email-sync in the account manager for the /e/ account. Still the notifications for new emails appears immediately.

The reason I ask is that the email app needs a lot of battery (>25%) on my phone and I think that is not normal. Has anybody similar issues?

My device: Samsung A5 (2017) with /e/ version e-0.7-p-2020033047438-dev-a5y17lte.zip

BR,
Johann

I tried to modify the sync-frequency in the email-app and even set it
to manual sync and disabled email-sync in the account manager for the
/e/ account. Still the notifications for new emails appears
immediately.

This is happening because IMAP push is enabled in the mail app by
default. This means that the app maintains a connection to the IMAP
server to be notified of changes immediately. You can disable this as
follows:

  • Open mail app
  • Tap three dots in right upper corner
  • Tap on a mail account if none is selected
  • Tap “Settings”
  • Tap “Account Settings”
  • Tap “Fetching mail”
  • Set “Push folders” to none
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I’m also experiencing rare and random battery drains by Mail app.
I kill it (force stop), and everything goes back to normal.

To prevent sync I use a different setting, don’t know if it’s better or not :wink:

  • open Mail app
  • tap three-dots on upper right
  • tap Settings
  • tap Network
  • change “Background sync” to “Never”
1 Like

Thanks a lot for the answer. Do you think the Push setting can cause the battery drain?

I checked Gitlab but didn’t find an issue on that. If I find time in the next days I’ll raise one!

Thanks a lot for the answer. Do you think the Push setting can cause the battery drain?

I think it can, I have noticed it draining my battery when I had
multiple accounts configured with push enabled at one point. Battery
consumption was considerably lower when I disabled the push setting.

Hi, I have same issue with mail app since last os update (04/16/20) It drains more than 30% battery life on a day. I can’t stop it or uninstall it, I’ll try you’re fix (Samsung S8)
Thanks

Hi, disabling the push settings an reducing the sync frequency worked fine for me. Email never needs more than 5% of battery now.

1 Like

Hi, I try this since this morning, it seems to fix my battery drain problem.
But I think it’s a bug to fix in the OS
Because before my last e update I haven’t any problem with mail app.

I applied the tips in this topic and hope it’ll help. But I also noticed that under ‘account settings > advanced’ there is a ‘Poll when connecting for push’ box checked. According to this website “When this is enabled K-9 Mail will do a full folder synchronization after establishing a Push connection. Otherwise it will only download new messages.”

To me this seems this is the underlying reason for the battery drainage when push is enabled. And maybe if this assumption is right, the ‘Poll when connecting for push’ box should be unchecked in the default settings.

Quick update:

Deactivating push brought battery usage down from 69% to 5%.

Out of curiousness I reactivated push and disabled the ‘poll when push’ option. This brought the battery usage back up to 30%.

So I went back to deactivating push.