Filed under: Apple, iPhone, iPod touch
Clarification on the iPhone Spotlight email issue
Earlier today, I posted about the ability to find previously deleted emails using the Spotlight search on the iPhone, adding to the already intense swarm of news surrounding this issue. My findings were that, by ensuring your trash folder was emptied and refreshed, the problem appeared to be solved. However, many of you responded indicating that this did not work for you, and that you were still seeing cached messages. Then Cult of Mac posted an update to their original piece, suggesting that the problem was more specific to POP accounts. Although I had tested both POP and IMAP accounts with similar results, I decided to investigate further.
First, to clarify: The problem here is *not* with Spotlight caching the contents of your email, as many have suggested. Spotlight simply indexes the available content on your phone, and logs a pointer to it. When you tap a search result, it opens the associated application and tells that app to view the content. In this case, it sees an email message and asks Mail.app to open it, which it does, because Mail.app still has the message content stored locally. Secondly, this appears to be specific to POP accounts. On IMAP or Exchange accounts, deleted email messages do appear in Spotlight results until the trash folder is emptied, as described in my earlier post.
I created a fresh account and configured it for POP access, then downloaded the mail. Searching spotlight, I could see the message I was looking for. I then went back to the message and deleted it, and that's where the fun starts. I conducted this same test multiple times, and found that sometimes, the message would now show up in Spotlight twice, one result opened the message, intact, with the Inbox listed as the folder to return to; the other displaying a message in the trash folder, but with an error displaying the body of the message. Other times, I would only see one result, pointed directly to the trash.
So I would then attempt to delete the message from the trash folder, which also yielded mixed results. In most cases, the message was still indeed visible from Spotlight. On the messages which had previously shown up twice, then tapping the search result would cause the message to display normally, but show that it was in the inbox. On other messages, it was more interesting, as the message would sometimes appear in the trash, and sometimes in a "Deleted Items" folder, and sometimes Mail.app would crash when trying to display the message. On one occasion, however, the message did disappear from the Spotlight results as expected, so it seems that the exact outcome varies from occasion to occasion.
Contrary to my previous opinion, this is definitely a bug, and some users have even reported that Spotlight is turning up a history of ALL of their deleted messages, not just those that were recently deleted. For those who are experiencing this problem, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the problem appears to be completely fixed in iPhone OS 3.1. That means the bad news, of course, is we have no idea when exactly the fix will be available publicly or if Apple is considering releasing an interim 3.0.2 update to address the issue. Further complicating matters, aside from deleting and recreating the mail account on your phone, there doesn't appear to be any workaround to preventing old messages from the Spotlight results until a software update addressing the issue becomes available.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
robogobo said 7:49PM on 8-18-2009
Still, it's important that you really really check that you've emptied the trash by deleting all messages in the trash (or whatever yours is called) before claiming you have a bug. And remember how funny (read: broken) gmail's IMAP is. You may actually have two trash folders, one of which you can't touch. I'd bet a quarter gmail is causing alot of the reported problems. In any case, Apple needs to put an "empty trash" button in the trash folder and make sure it's actually working.
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Michael Jones said 7:53PM on 8-18-2009
Exactly. That's why I took that angle at first with my original post, and only wrote this after it was confirmed that there was indeed a bug somewhere. I think it's too easy for most people to forget that the trash even exists sometimes (I know I do) and therefore somewhat logical that the emails in the trash folder could still be found.
CoreyJF said 8:01PM on 8-18-2009
I agree it should be fixed, but I honestly don't see the big deal. Email is not really secure. If someone gets a hold of your phone, you have far more problems to worry about then the contents of deleted email that someone would need to know the contents of, or at least key words, to search for. If you loose you phone, remote wipe it. If you haven't lost it, be careful who you give it to. Don't put anything in email you wouldn't want to see on the cover of the New York Time.
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justin said 8:49PM on 8-18-2009
It seems that the fix in 3.1 clears the index and doesn't securely "wipe" the data from the phone, but this is no different than any desktop computer so I'm satisfied. If anyone needs more security than that they shouldn't be receiving emails on a phone.
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Michael Jones said 9:25PM on 8-18-2009
Yup, that's how most any delete function on a computer works though, taking the extra time to wipe over the space is more overhead than most people are willing to put up with, particularly on a mobile device. That said, an option to securely wipe data as it's removed wouldn't be entirely out of line, IMO, as long as it was made clear that it could affect performance and/or battery life.
Albert said 2:15AM on 8-19-2009
Its not a big issue, given that its confined to e-mail. I think the bigger problem is that the iPhone was not designed with security in its DNA, its an afterthought. I think its fair to say as a heavily marketed consumer device, there's no issue. When people want to keep propping up the iPhone as an enterprise device (meaning big pockets and big liability) then you really start having to face the reality that the iPhone is not ready for primetime today.
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Rick said 8:50AM on 8-19-2009
Does anyone know if it's possible to set up MobileMe as a POP account? I need to be able to delete emails off of my iPhone but still receive them in Apple Mail.
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sarah said 5:33PM on 10-29-2009
Was this fixed? I have version 3.1.2 and my phone still shows in search deleted messages that have been deleted forever from the trash in gmail. I suppose it's not a huge deal, but... it is tedious to have deleted stuff pop up in a search.
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