OK, so I usually love my iPhone. It’s days like today, though, that make me wanna chuck it in a conveniently located river from a conveniently well placed bridge.

As part of a small event I run monthly, I got an e-mail from someone yesterday with some large attachments — ended up being about 24mb altogether. My mail server had no problem with it, and Apple’s Mail application had no problem with it. However, when the iPhone got ahold of it…. Well, frustrating doesn’t hardly put the appropriately contorted face on it. I’d try to delete the e-mail, and Mail app on the phone would choke and die, even to the point of affecting the read/unread status of e-mails in other accounts that feed through my iPhone.

I tried sooooo many solutions, but here’s the solution I ran across that seemed to solve my problem. First, change the iPhone Mail settings to only display the last 25 items. That’s probably a pretty good setting for me most of the time anyway. Second, make sure that the mail account on the mail server is devoid of any new e-mail. And lastly, send myself 25 (or more) e-mails so that the only thing displayed are the new e-mails. That seemed to “scroll” the mongo e-mail off the screen, never to return…. so far.

This is a horrible behavior by the iPhone. There should be no acceptable mail behavior (meaning that the e-mail lives within standards) that should cause the mail app to behave this way.

Apple — this one hurts!