Q: Unknown data usage early morning

I think that extra option only came in from 3Gs onwards C Irene.  Have you looked through:

Settings > General > About > Scroll to the bottom of this screen and find Diagnostics & Usage and change this to Don't Send ?

I'm afraid I've not used the 3 myself so hopefully someone in here can help more with that one.

Calineil

http://you-are-all-you-need-to-be.blogspot.com/2012/03/trouble-with-too-smart-ph ones.html

So, my wife's phone has started using massive data again. It's the same problem with the Mail App when it can't connect to one of her IMAP email accounts for some unknown reason. It just sits there and spins trying to connect to the mail server and uses up to a Gigabyte a day trying to connect. This first happened on her old phone (iPhone4/iOS4) back in October and I diagnosed it down to the mail app (discussion back on page 94 or 95 of this thread. Somewhere in there...). Anyways, it hasn't happened since then, and now she has an iPhone4S running iOS5.1 and it started doing it again in March. It did it for a couple days and used 2.5GB of data, but it stopped and she didn't go over her 4GB plan. But I reset the usage counter at the beginning of the month and it has already Sent 1.6GB data since then. Ugh. Apple needs to fix this. No reason the phone should be re-trying a thousand times a second or whatever it is when it can't connect to the server. I know this is a different problem than many of you are having, and maybe it should be a separate thread, but in case it helps someone, check your Mail accounts and make sure they can each be updated successfully to rule this problem out. When this happens, the inbox for the specific account won't ever update. It just spins and spins and eventually you get a popup saying it can't access the server, but it doesn't stop trying.... ever. Until it randomly stops again at some point.

The other telltale sign it's a mail app problem is that if you reset your cellular usage counter, you'll see the Sent data skyrocket while the Received is tiny. My wife uses about 300MB a month usually, but in the last 4 days she has Sent 1.6GB and received 61Mb.

Here's a snip from the ATT billing. 400MB in 2 hours. Yikes:

I believe the "System Services" option in "Location Services" was new to iOS 5, which the iPhone 3G does not support. (The last version the iPhone 3G supported was 4.2.1)

iOS 5.0 supported the iPhone 3GS and later.

iOS 4.2.1 doesn't have the Settings > General > About > Diagnostics & Usage option, either.

Here we are, back again, just as I predicted I would be six months ago.  This is my 4th instance of outrageous data use and I've gone right back to the National Urgent Care Center at AT&T.  Included all my old emails and fired an updated note to them.  Got a rather subdued response back from them, more or less saying there isn't much they can do about the problem.  I asked them to revisit all three previous occurrences and review what actions their people took because within a day or two of contacting them, the problem went away.  Someone (obviously lower level workers) are missing something in their initial investigation.  Once it gets bumped up the food chain, "someone" does "something" to make it go away!!  Unfortunately, that "someone" doesn't seem to have documented the procedure or was told NOT to.

For those of you who have not read my entries beginning around page 83 or so, every six months I see data use spike on my account which contains two phones. With an iMac, a MacBook, and an iPad2 all living in a WiFi environment, it is rare that we use our phones for anything other than calls or texting/iMessaging.  Both phones have the 200MB plans and rarely hit a combined 50MB use on a normal month.  I've tried to explain that to the AT&T folks but, so far, it doesn't seem to have sunk in.  We close down Apps at the end of the day, have everything except Cellular Data turned off, and have done "hard resets" on several occasions since the problem reappeared. 

I had Dataman and Onavo on both phones but found them to be battery hogs and they didn't really provide me with any eye opening information.  Then again, maybe I didn't have them set up properly!!

Yes, this is exactly the same as I reported several weeks ago - I get the same thing - when my mail app fails to connect, the downloads go up.  I cant figure out why it fails but I simply cancel the account and start a new one with identical settings and it all works again.  It is always the same email address that fails - my other email address through the same server doesnt do it.  And they have identical settings.  So I dont know why but at least I have a workaround.

My email provider is in the UK so it is nothing to do with AT&T here!

I had the data consumption issue on my 3GS, iOS4 as well as iOS5. I believe Textfree app, on my cell was responsible for this huge data uploads. I uninstalled Textfree and everything looks normal. For re-confirmation I installed Textfree couple of days back. Within 10 minutes the data transfer was around 13MB. And also I observed that Textfree was using the AT&T data, even though I had my Wireless turned ON and I was at my home with Internet connection perfectly working. I couldn't explain this. I ended up un-installing the Textfree again.

I am happy to report that the changes that Neil suggested seem to have done the trick. It's been a week now and the early-morning usages have stopped.

Thanks again, Neil!

My large usage seems to be down.  It's still using data I'm not always using.  I downloaded the DataMan app and it tells me that I've used 8.0 MB so far, with 19 days to the end of my billing cycle.   61.1 MB on Wi-Fi.  I leave both of those on.  But leave 3G off until I want to use it.

Anyone else use the Pro version of DataMan?  If so.... how do I get it to stop alerting me that I've used 0% of my monthly allowance multiple times a day? (or whatever percentage I happen to be at)  I only want to be alerted to the percentages I set them to.

Thanks for the great advice, Neil!  Much appreciated!

Hi there Jes42 and sorry to hear your're having those issues as well.  Is there any chance you could check for the extra settings in:

Location Services > System Services > Diagnostics and Usage and iAds ?

The Diagnostics and Usage settings here are additional to the ones most people change in the General > About

Also, if you're using Dataman Pro and Onavo, please keep a watch out for apps that relate to any names called Pinch Media / Flurry as this is yet another usage-mining apps that's been created to send your usage info back to out.  It more than likely runs updates on the apps that are coded with Pinch Media / Flurry programming tags to update your ads and usage / location stats too.

I hope we can piece by piece figure out what's going on and sort this out for you.

Calineil

http://you-are-all-you-need-to-be.blogspot.com/2012/04/welcome-along-on-this-jou rney.html

HI Broooz and sorry to hear about your problems as well.  Great news though that you've found a work around.

Just a thought that's come to mind.  Would it be possilbe to have all your incoming emails diverted to one main address such as a Me.com account and have this running as your primary email to avoid IMAP sync issues and do you have your phone or automatic push or manual fetch ? 

I've seen a large number of posts in various places stating the issues with IMAP sync failing and constanly re-trying which is something we maybe need an Apple Tech to sort out as it's something a large number of people are getting issues with.  Typical that it takes us the user so long to get a resolution from those that SHOULD be doing more to help but just going through some ideas to see if there's a way to smooth things out too.

Nice work on the work around though

Calineil

http://you-are-all-you-need-to-be.blogspot.com/2012/04/welcome-along-on-this-jou rney.html

Hi there ddsuresh and nice work on getting rid off Textfree.

In the realms of apps it's always a good idea to find out as much as you can about what "tags" and programs the app itself is associated with.  There are an enormous number of great apps out there but also an even bigger number out there that use add-on software such as iAds or Pinch Media to report usage and stats and download updates whenever they feel like it even after you've turned your app off.

It definitely pays to check out all the information you can get from the app info or the developer themselves before adding something to you phone. 

Calineil

http://you-are-all-you-need-to-be.blogspot.com/2012/04/welcome-along-on-this-jou rney.html

Hi there again thezonie and that REALLY is great news for sure.  Thanks for the update too and here's hoping we get more and more cases like ours to start knocking back un-known data usage.

I've had very, very little data usage over this past two weeks since I changed my settings.  It's gone from seeing up to 75Mb over night to not even 100Kb of data if any that I can't explain and during the day I'm using up to approx 60Mb with only approx 300Kb of that using 3G data when I'm out and about.  Not taking into account any surfing or social network access though as usual. Lol.

GREAT news for sure thezonie and please, if it starts to show up again please can you let me know even if it's a quick note on my blog or here ?  I'll gladly try and help out some more as I'm constantly doing checks and research on what's happening with data usage and apps.

Thanks thezonie.

Calineil

http://you-are-all-you-need-to-be.blogspot.com/2012/04/welcome-along-on-this-jou rney.html

Hey there DanceForce77 and welcome along again too.

In regards Dataman Pro, I've got that running and so far so good, it seems to line up with AT&T usage stats and the phones' main data stats.  I'm lucky I guess that we ended up having to get my data usage increased to 3Gig as I was having those major issues with over-usage before I sorted out my settings as well but I still like to monitor my phone as if I'm still on a 200Mb plan just in case for now.

Just curious, have you tried resetting all the Dataman Pro settings at the bottom of your settings screen ?

One that's done you should be able to change the settings back to what you like.  I've got mine running at 50% first,  70% second, 90% third and 100% fourth but so far I've not had any warnings show up at all that I didn't need to know about.  It's weird it sends you that amount of notices but it may also be that it's primarily set up for a 3G check so if you have your 3G turned off it's thinking it's monitoring your Wi-Fi ?  Not sure I'm afraid and could be something to ask the developer about ?

How would it go running a test with leaving your 3G on for a day and a night and see what your usage and monitoring notifications do then ?

Hoping we all have a GREAT week ahead too.

Calineil

http://you-are-all-you-need-to-be.blogspot.com/2012/04/welcome-along-on-this-jou rney.html

Thanks Calineil.  I prefer to have my accounts kept separate as they all have a different purpose but thanks anyway.  I have set to manual mostly. 

Just need to keep trying !

Awesome broooz and I hope it settles down again soon too. 

Definitely keep trying and I'm going to dig around some more on the IMAP issue and email sync fails.  There's got to be a way to sort this out from a few settings changes.

Have a GREAT week too broooz.

Neil.