Yahoo! Mail was found out yesterday, having been revealed as the culprit causing excessive data usage on Windows Phone 7 devices.  But pointing a finger at the core of this issue is a bit trickier than that.  Windows Phone 7 communicates to IMAP mail servers, including Yahoo’s, via the IMAP protocol, but while WP7’s approach is not standard, the problem is relevant to Yahoo only, and it’s for a reason.

“Yahoo’s servers…completely disregard the request for specific information, and return dozens of unwanted details about each e-mail, in addition to the explicitly requested information.”

This is indeed the root of the problem, but Windows Phone 7 does request IMAP IDs, instead of message IDs. If Microsoft would do some standardizing this problem would be resolved. Moreover, the latter has been criticized for not identifying the issues earlier – around November, to be more specific, when news of abnormal levels of data usage first broke. To top that, Microsoft identified the problem but it didn’t announce any plans to do something about it, though a major WP7 update is expected to roll out around Feb. 7.

Excessive data usage, or billing for that matter, has been a bit of a big deal lately. Yesterday we discussed the breaking news that AT&T has been sued by a California man for charging customers for phantom and excessive usage. Verizon in turn is bulking up its East Coast infrastructure to prepare and be able to manage data influxes.

So it seems, big data stands at the root of many mobile-related developments, giving rise to necessary discussions regarding the best ways to handle our growing data problems.  This is a major topic of interest for attendees (physical and virtual) at this year’s Strata Conference, which discusses the very data management issues mentioned above. The conference ponders the implications and business strategies around solving large-scale enterprise problems, across several industries, including the mobile and personal cloud realms.