I have a rather large inbox, about 4000 emails.

I set my N800 to only download headers and to only download 50 headers. The behaviour I expected is that it would always show me the most RECENT 50 headers.

But oh no, it does something totally insane. Each time it checks email it downloads 50 headers it has not yet downloaded, meaning that gradually over the day the inbox gets bigger and bigger until it has 4000 emails. So for example the first time you do get the 50 most recent headers. The next time it checks for email, even though there are no new emails, it pulls in the next 50 older headers.

End result, the N800 cannot cope with 4000 email headers and grinds to a halt where I then have to bring up an xterm and manually wipe the inbox.

Has anyone else noticed this behaviour?

I haven't used the N800 email client but there are some remarks about it at this site about 3/4 of the way down the page:
http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/
He says in part:
"...so far as I've been able to tell the email program is incapable of clearing your email cache. So if you set it to download 50 messages, the next day it downloads more messages to add to that 50. You can't restrict it to just 50, and you can't clear them out to save memory, short of removing the account. Oh yes, and the email is stored on your internal flash with no option to move it to a card: it just slowly burns your flash out."

I have a Nokia 770 with the latest build. I have configured it to retrieve my email from Gmail. So far yet, I have not had much problem with it. When I retrieve my mail and get mails that I do not think useful, then I simply select them on the Nokia 770 and shove them to the ' Garbage Bin ' of the Nokia 770. While doing this I get the option to ' remove the mail from the Server and the Nokia 770 ' or the Nokia 770 only. Depending on my whim at that point of time, I select one or the other. So far as today, I have not had any problem with this setup.

I do not think that this setup would be much different for N800.