Whenever i try to sync a Microsoft Exchange mail account to an iPhone, it seems to constantly search for mail with 3G which crucifies the battery life. I've tried this with a few different phones and exchange accounts for friends & colleagues and it always happens. Anyone know why or how to stop it happening?
Exchange mail account kills iPhone battery. Why
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Related Solutions
With ActiveSync (i.e. Exchange type account) Here's how to work around this problem;
Go to
Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > [Your Google Sync Account] > Account Infoand change theAddressfield to the email alias you normally send from (this will be use as the default when ever you want to answer emails)Create other email accounts by following these instructions with one exception. On step 7 enter the email alias instead of your GMail address for both the address field. You may want to use good description for this "bogus" account.
Once you have done the final save, tap on the account you've just created and erase the
Incoming Mail Server Host(imap.gmail.com). It's important to leave this field blank since it will prevent you from receiving duplicate email. It will however still allow you to send outgoing from the email account you've just created
To select the source email address when you reply simply tap on the from field and a rolodex will let you select your from address.
They are two caveats to this however
The iPhone mail application will not select the from address automatically. It will always default to the email address you've set at step 1 even if you are replying to an email sent to one of the aliases.
Since this involve creating a "bogus" account in the iPhone mail application every time you'll hit the refresh button you'll get an error message stating that the iPhone cannot retrieve email from the dummy account. The error repeats itself for every "bogus" account.
Some other people may like to know that for any IMAP account in the iPhone Mail application you can always go into Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > [Your IMAP Account] and change the Address field to a comma separated list of email address that are associated with that account. Since the field will not let you put in a comma directly you'll need to use paste the list in the field. The list itself should look something like this:
myFirstAlias@company.com, mySecondAlias@company.com, myThirdAlias@anotherdomain.com
I've used Funambol to recover\merge\backup my iPhone Exchange Contacts in the past with good results. It was a bit fussy so follow the instructions carefully with regard to what you want to sync back to their cloud and how you want contacts to be merged or you can end up deleting things you want to keep. The safest approach is to initially set it up just to back up rather than update the iPhone contacts, once you are happy that you have your contacts saved then you can use it to push the contacts back to the iPhone without worrying.
Best Answer
It is not so much Exchange but more just having the 3G connection on 24x7.
You can try (only speaking from personal use of version 2) going to settings, then one of the top options is "fetch new data" (or along those lines) and try to turn it down slightly so it checks in a lot less frequently.
That being said, I can not say if the 3g connection won't drain the battery if it is just on but not fetching data. - You may want to see if there is any way to disable it / set it to on-demand.
Edit - for reference, I had a Sony Ericsson phone with 3G, the battery lasted around 3-4 days, however if I kept MSN messenger working in the backgruond with 3G on, I was lucky to get ~12 hours.