K-9 Mail: Synching Disabled

I had to re-install K-9 Mail yesterday due to a phone crash. After setting up my accounts it displayed the message “synching disabled”, which I had never see before. Synching manually worked fine, but it would never synch automatically.

Then I read a hint that I couldn’t believe, but I tried and it did work:

I had set up my accounts using WiFi. The hint tells you to delete all accounts, disable WiFi, enable 3G and create the accounts again.

Hard to believe, but it did the trick. Now it syncs flawlessly bother over 3G and WiFi.

When checking the K-9 Mail support forum I noticed that a lot of people had come across the same issue, but instead of helpful answers I only saw question after question from the K-9 team more or less stating that there was no error. I guess the sheer number of problem reports should teach them otherwise and the simple solution should give them a good hint as to where to look for the problem?

Edit 10-OCT-2011: Unfortunately the software fell back to the “synching disabled” behaviour a day later! I then change the setting to sync “always”, not only “when background sync is checked”, and this apparently works now.

I guess the new version of this application just does not properly pick up my global setting for background syncing.

Edit 06-JAN-2012: I recently installed ICS and tried reverting K9-Mail to “normal” settings – it works fine now. I am just not sure whether the fix is related to me installing ICS or to an unnoticed update to K9-Mail. Anyway, it works as expected again.