Help Mail app notification not working

[phsteele]

I've had a Galaxy Nexus (through Bell Canada) for about a month. It runs ICS 4.0.1. Last night I noticed that the email notification for my Exchange 2010 account wasn't working. I made some obvious checks but didn't find anything wrong, so I powered down the phone and after the reboot it appeared to be working again. Today the same thing happened, but even after a power cycle I can't get email notification working. I've tried deleting the Exchange account and re-add it but that didn't help. I've tried turning off the notification setting, and then turning it back on. Still no go. I even tried deleting all my email accounts and used Task Killer to clear out all data but still no luck. To make things even more puzzling the mail app does work with another Exchange account, as well as with my gmail account.

As far as I remember, I didn't make any changes that would have affected my email account. At this point I'm stumped. I've read some other threads on this topic and none seem to apply to my case. One solution someone tried was to reinstall Android. I'm willing to attempt that although it seems like overkill. Is it worth trying the factory data reset?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Metroid Prime]

Hello and welcome to Android Forums.

You should uninstall task killer because those types of apps do more harm than good for your phone. It uses more juice killing the apps than it would without it.
It might be causing the notification problem too perhaps.
You could try clearing the cache on your mail app by going to Settings > Manage Applications and selecting the app and you should see an option to clear the cache.
Let me know how it goes.

BTW, is that mail app stock? Did it come with the phone?

 

[phsteele]

I installed Task Killer after the problem started from a suggestion I read in another posting. I have no plans to keep it around once I'm done with this issue.

I forgot to mention that I'm using the stock mail app that came with the phone and is part of ICS (can't be uninstalled). One of my troubleshooting steps was to clear the cache but that didn't help.

Just out of the blue my alerts have started working again. I'm not sure how long it will stay that way, but I sent several test messages and so far it seems to be sticking. A very weird/annoying problem!

 

[phsteele]

I finally figured out what's going on. Normally I have several email messages in my inbox. When new mail arrives it gets added to the top and at the same time my Nexus gets an alert. Yesterday I happened to process all of my outstanding email and clear out my inbox. When new email arrived to my empty inbox, the Outlook running on my PC immediately read the email and marked it as read (even though I might not have actually read it personally yet - it's how I like Outlook set up). When the email gets marked as read immediately after the message arrives, no alert is generated on my Nexus. Because I was not reading my gmail account with Outlook it always worked, but email to my Exchange account was failing once I emptied my inbox. It just happened to be a quiet few days at work and I haven't been getting much email.

It's the first time in a long time that my inbox has been empty, so the problem just didn't get a chance to occur. Now that I know what's happening I may change my Outlook settings to to mark as email as read until I tell it to.

Kind of embarassing!

 

[Metroid Prime]

lol I'm glad you figured it out.
I'm going to move your thread to your devices forum.
If you experience anymore problems please feel free to ask.

 

[Insomniac3]

Hope it's okay to reopen this thread rather than start a new one covering the same ground.

Identical problem, but not sure about the given solution. What did the trick for me was altering the account (Exchange Active Sync) "Sync schedule" to Push from Manual. I'd switched it previously to Manual as Push appeared to be draining the battery. Resetting the schedule to Push definitely solved the notification problem. So it's a tricky choice, either have notifications and lose battery power or delay notifications and conserve power. I've set the sync currently to 5 minutes and will see how that works.

My phone is not a Nexus, but this looks more like an Android than device specific setting.