iPhone OS 3.0 bug means emails cannot be deleted

by Julian Prokaza
on Tue 18 Aug 2009 Comment

It was only the other day when the smartphone world was agog (well, ish) with the news that Palm was purportedly spying on its Pre smartphone users, and now news is breaking that  that Apple iPhone owners are subject to a serious smartphone security risk, too.

The word is that emails deleted under the recently released iPhone 3.0 OS aren’t completely deleted and their contents can still be found long after the message has been purged from the Mail application’s inbox. As you can probably guess, this is a bug rather than yet more sneaky smartphone snooping, but it could still spell trouble for anyone who routinely uses their iPhone for communication that has to be kept away from prying eyes.

More details, plus a video of the email bug in action, after the cut.

The bug occurs when the Mail application in iPhone OS 3.0 is used to connect to a POP3 or IMAP mail server like those provided by Gmail. One a message has been received and deleted from both the Inbox and the Trash folder (as provided by some email servers), it’s still possible to find the message using the iPhone’s Spotlight tool. Attempting to open the message from Spotlight the first time causes the Mail app to crash, but it does get opened successfully on the second attempt.

It looks like deleted messages are not being flushed from the Spotlight search index, but it does mean that it isn’t possible to completely delete emails under iPhone OS 3.0. Apple is reportedly aware of the bug and it may be fixed in the imminent iPhone OS 3.1 update — or perhaps it will just rename the Mail app’s delete button to ‘Archive’…

[Via Endgadget]

Originally published on www.mobilecomputermag.co.uk, now incorporated into Broadband Genie

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