Yahoo Data Leak on Windows Phone 7 Solved

A while ago, various Windows Phone 7 users reported increased data consumption on their devices, a few times higher than it should have normally been, and Microsoft looked into the matter and informed them that Yahoo was to blame for that.

From a handful of applications that might have caused the said increase in data consumption, Yahoo Mail was nailed down as the root of the problem, and it seems that the issue was recently declared solved.

Apparently, the Yahoo Mail app was downloading on users' phones much more data than it should have, thus causing the increased consumption and making users unhappy.

The issue reportedly resided in the manner in which the Yahoo Mail servers were responding to the periodic requests for updates in the mailbox that were being sent out by Windows Phone 7 devices.

The handsets would request info on new emails, and, instead of sending out a small subset of available data, the Yahoo servers would push to them full message headers, more that what was usually needed.

Yahoo did not announce the resolving of this issue, but some of the enthusiasts monitoring the matter report that the problem seems to have been solved.

Developer Rafael Rivera notes in a recent blog post that the “imapgate” software version from Yahoo was updated to a new version.

“Today, I was pleasantly surprised to see they had upgraded from 0.7.65_12.286037 to 0.7.65_14.298026 fixing the issue. I can’t say when this happened precisely, but I suspect it was rolled out earlier in the week, to coincide with the new Windows Phone update,” he states in the aforementioned blog post.

Since the Yahoo servers are sending only a small amount of information to Windows Phone 7 devices when requested, namely the Message-ID, users should no longer be impacted by the aforementioned increases in data usage.