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ZOMBIE NOTES! Can't delete notes from iPod

I have some notes on my 2nd gen iPod touch I just can't get rid of.

I have deleted them from the app. From my mac. From gmail. I have used spotlight to search for every occurrence of a unique string within each note, and then deleted them. Ditto on my gmail account, searched and deleted.

But the notes keep coming back! Not right away, but after a sync or two, THEY ARE BACK!

Weird. Any thoughts on how to terminate these pesky notes permanently?

Thanks in advance!

J

27" iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.1), Apple TV. iPod touch (2nd gen)

Posted on Apr 15, 2010 3:54 PM

Reply
7 replies

May 20, 2010 12:21 AM in response to Janos Pataki

SOLVED!!!!!!

I'm using a MacBook Pro, iPod Touch, and syncing Notes from Mail on my laptop. I have two mail accounts on my laptop: my @me.com account and my @gmail.com account. The trick to killing the zombie notes is to kill them in your inbox. You may not have noticed them, but they're in there. I was looking all over my hard drive but they were sitting there in my inbox. Since Spotlight doesn't search your mail messages, it wasn't finding them. Here's what was happening:

I would delete notes on my iPod and a few syncs later they would reappear. I couldn't find them anywhere on my laptop, and I had gone so far as to restore my iPod... but they kept coming back.

Last night I figured it out. Apparently every time I created or edited a note, a copy of it was getting sent to my Gmail inbox. (You may not be using Gmail, but this will probably work for any mail system you access through Mail.) To kill the zombies, I opened my Gmail web client, and then searched for each of my zombie notes and deleted all of them. I found multiple versions for each of the 8 zombie notes on my iPod (around 40 separate entries in my Gmail Inbox). I deleted all of them on the web client, then deleted all of them in my inbox in Mail on my desktop. If you don't kill them on the web client AND in Mail, they will keep reloading from one to the other each time you open Mail - that's why it would take them a sync or two before they would reappear on your iPod.

Anyway, once the notes had been deleted from both inboxes, they all dropped off my iPod the next time I synced it. I didn't even have to delete them off the iPod; they just disappeared. They are still gone after a dozen test syncs. It appears to have worked. Zombies are dead.

ZOMBIE NOTES! Can't delete notes from iPod

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