Posted by Mike, an Android application developer on Murano Software’s team.

As you may know, one of Murano Software’s strong specialties is Android software development. I use the T-Mobile G1 myself, and one of my most-used apps is Gmail. While on the go, I quite often pull my buddy and key in e-mails. Recently Gmail stopped showing new e-mails in inbox, which was very inconvenient. All other Internet-enabled apps and even other features of the Gmail app worked perfectly. For example, I could search the inbox, and I could send new e-mails, but the phone refused to show new e-mails. They popped up on my Web-based Gmail client as frequently as usual, but they didn’t appear on my Android phone. I, obviously, hit “Refresh” plenty of times, rebooted the phone and tried to pull other tricks, but nothing worked. G1 was quite stubborn. “Time to call a T-Mobile rep,” I’m thinking.

I’m on the phone with rep. He’s as friendly as all other T-Mobile reps. But this time he’s not being helpful. He advises me to turn my mobile phone off, take out the battery and turn G1 on, saying that this way, the phone will register on a different cell tower and that this may help. I told him that I already traveled 50 miles across dense suburbia, meaning that I am already on a different tower. I told him that the data worked fine. This didn’t bother my dude. His next advice was worthy of being included in U.S. version of “The IT Crowd,” if somebody is ever going to make one. The rep recommended doing a hard reset on my phone.  Not good, especially when you are sitting in an airport waiting for your flight.

I kindly finished the conversation. Later, I played with my G1 and found a much lighter way of solving the problem. I went to “Settings,” “Applications,” “Manage Applications,” “Gmail Storage” and then clicked on the “Clear Data” button. I also did the same for the “Gmail” application. It helped. My inbox became empty, then the phone synced  with Gmail (it took some time), and I started to get new e-mails. Voila, all without a system reset. I was not asked to reenter my Gmail password or anything like that; my android phone got that figured out by itself.

If you end up with no e-mail on your next vacation, don’t blame me; enjoy the sun. I wasn’t asked to reenter my Gmail password, but you should have  yours handy. If you mess something up, you always can fall back on T-Mobile’s reset advice, I guess.

Disclaimer: use this work-around at your own risk. We don’t provide consumer support for Android phones; we develop cool Android applications for our customers.

The phone I use is a first-generation T-Mobile G1 with Android 1.6 (cupcake). Firmware version 1.6. Build number DRC83.