iPod Mail.app problem and solution

While the upgrade to 2.0.1 firmware on my iPod Touch went smoothly and appeared to be working fine, I later discovered a problem with the Mail.app. Since upgrading the firmware erases the installed OS, it also removes the mail messages. As I use Gmail with IMAP access these messages are stored in the Gmail account so should be synchronised when accessing the Mail application. What was happening was two attempts at downloading the mail messages then Mail.app quit.

I tried deleting the mail account on the iPod, but this wouldn’t budge. iTunes returned an error message that the iPod cancelled the sync when trying to copy the mail account from the Mac to iPod (see above). This looked like a permissions problem to me, so I connected to the iPod using SSH. You need to install OpenSSH from Cydia on a jailbroken device for this to work.

At first trying to connect returned a warning message as the secure key had changed (the firmware had been updated so I suspect this was the cause). The recommendation was to add the new key to the Users/Your_Account_name/.ssh/known_hosts file. I use the excellent Forklift for quickly getting to hidden files, and this quickly revealed that there was only one key in the file. I renamed it to known_hosts_old and this forced the generation of a new secure key in a new known_hosts file. Once logging in via SSH works it’s easy to use an FTP program (I use Fetch) to browse the iPod or iPhone’s directory tree using the SFTP protocol.

The directory that I wanted was /private/var/mobile/Library/Mail. Permissions on this were set to 755, and changing this to 777 (allowing write for the group mobile) resolved the problem. as soon as this was changed the Gmail account could be deleted, restored by iTunes and messages downloaded. I’m not sure if this is a PwnageTool bug or a 2.0.1 firmware problem, so I will have a search to see if anyone else has the same issue.

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