Workaround for iPhone eating draft e-mail

I recently posted my experiences with a serious bug that I discovered on my iPhone 3GS after it lost the entire contents of two different e-mail messages. The bug appears to be caused by a problem with my e-mail accounts on MobileMe or Gmail and accessing them later on my iPhone.

(Credit: David Martin)

The steps that I have used to demonstrate the bug, which I've been able to successfully replicate every time on my iPhone running OS 3.1 or 3.1.2 and my MobileMe account are posted in My iPhone eats draft e-mail--yours could too.

After providing Apple with application and iPhone logs, MobileMe support asked me to try the following workaround:

• On your desktop or notebook, log into your MobileMe account using "xxxxxx" as your log-in name (leave out the @me and @mac extensions).
• Create a new message.
• Set the Account drop-down menu to xxxxxx@me.com.
• Save the draft.
• Verify that the draft is in the drafts folder on MobileMe.
• Switch to your iPhone.
• Access your MobileMe Drafts folder on the iPhone.
• Open the saved draft.
• Add contents to the e-mail.
• Send the message from your iPhone and see if the issue is reproduced.

I completed these steps and was surprised to see that the e-mail had been sent.

I've asked Apple to tell me if this problem can be blamed on MobileMe or my iPhone. My educated guess is that the problem is with the MobileMe service, but at press time, Apple had not responded to my queries.

Are you experiencing this problem on your iPhone or iPod Touch? Let us know in the comments.