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Help Troubleshooting: What could cause huge data use??

D

daverea

Lurker
Hi All-

My father-in-law and I both have Droid Incredibles. I consider myself a moderately-heavy data user, and consume about 1.5GB/month. He just uses the phone for calls and e-mail, but when we were going through the usage on our family plan yesterday, his phone is using upwards of 40GB per month!! He's been complaining about the phone being very warm and having very poor battery life lately, so this explains why!

I looked through his phone for an app that could be causing such bandwidth consumption. He has nothing installed beyond the factory apps besides Zillow, and rarely uses it. While he uses the "Mail" application for IMAP access to his work e-mail, and receives upwards of 500-1000 spam messages a day, they're only 3K-4K each. This only accounts for a few hundred megabytes of transfer.

I did discover that the Mail app was mis-configured for outgoing mail, and corrected his SMTP settings. This may have accounted for some extra bandwidth as the mail app tried and retried to connect to the mail server. But still: I can't imagine it would consume 36GB since December 5th!

Here is what I've tried so far:

  • Look through running services: Nothing out of the ordinary
  • Check to make sure 3G hotspot is off: It is disabled
  • Look through app list: Nothing out of the ordinary
  • Look at large battery consumers: Nothing out of the ordinary
  • Review Verizon's usage data and look for patterns in when heavy usage occured

Unfortunately, Verizon's data usage list doesn't separate upload from download bandwidth, as this would be helpful in determining the culprit. Anyone have any ideas as to what could be causing this much usage??!

Many Thanks,
Dave
 
While he uses the "Mail" application for IMAP access to his work e-mail, and receives upwards of 500-1000 spam messages a day, they're only 3K-4K each.
Click to expand...

It doesnt matter that the actual emails are only 5k a piece, they are using more data to download. Not to mention, thats a TON of spam. He needs to apply some filtering to stop those. And for spam messages that recur many times a day, he needs to unsubscribe from those, which will greatly cut down on the spam.

Other than that, how often is the Mail syncing? And you didnt say if you checked Menu-Settings-Accounts and Sync. Thats where your main data usage will occur. Check all those, my Evo from the factory was set to sync weather, news and stocks, neither of which I use.

Otherwise, have you tried installing Spare Parts and System Panel? Let those run for a few days and they will show whats using the network and cpu.
 
Thank you both for the suggestions - the next time we get together, I will set up his phone with the apps you suggested, and we'll start monitoring usage.

I figured the large volume of spam is likely a contributor, but even with protocol overhead, I couldn't account for a power-of-ten difference between theoretical and actual consumption. However, in combination with persistent unsuccessful outgoing mail server attempts, this could have been a big part.

As of today, I haven't seen any large usage spikes in the log. I'll keep my eye on it, though, and report back.

Thanks again,
Dave
 
PS - Mail syncs every 15 minutes, which may be excessive given his large spam volume.

He is planning to request his company's part-time sysadmin improve their spam filtering, and I suggested that he move to using GMail as his IMAP client if he sees no improvement. He is clearly frustrated with the volume of spam, most of which is 1-line of random ASCII along with some malicious HTML and images. Their server isn't defanging anything, so I'd hate to see what sort of nasties are infesting the company's desktops!
 
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