Data usage

[cconway01]

Has your data usage ever started to grow quickly for no apparent reason?  Mine did because of an email.  I am on a 2GB plan and hardly get to 1GB per month normally.  All of sudden I blew through 2GB in the first 13 days of the billing cycle and on target to use at least 6GB.  The alerts did not work until I was already over the limit even though I had the 50%, 75%, 90% and 100% turned on.

The culprit, verify you don't have an email stuck in the outbox.  It took several days to figure this out and Verizon Wireless support was useless.  I tried to send a large email with picture attachments that was too big to go out.  Instead of giving me an error, the email system continued to try and send this email for 3 days.  The entire time it was racking up data usage at an alarming rate, measured in MB rather than KB as usual for me. 

I checked and rechecked my email settings and all other data usage items I could think of.  I found and downloaded My Data Manager.  This app identifies what app is using data bandwidth and how much.  It helped me isolate that email was causing the issue.  I kept looking at email settings and finally found the message in the outbox, deleted it and solved the problem. 

I spent at least 2 hours on different phone calls with VZ support even going up the chain to Tier 2 and they never once got close to the problem, even arguing with me that there was no app that could tell me how the data was being used.  Of course they have a vested interest in NOT solving the problem and charging more for data usage.  Their solution was to do a hard reset of the phone.  That is a total pain to reconfigure email and download all the apps again. 

[KrissyK]

Thank you so much for your help. I was having the same problem and couldn't figure out why my data plan was going crazy.  Picture email was stuck in outbox. Thanks again.

[PepperAn]

Yes, Thank you so much for posting your " Find", being the email stuck in the outbox. You're right, Verizon stores and reps by phone had no suggestions on what was eating my data. It was obvious from my past bills that my data usage was over the roof compared to the previous ones. Just glad you brought this to my attention. Thank You " cconway01 " for saving me a ton of money! God Bless....PepperAnn ( Patty )

[scrappingchic]

FYI the Mange My Data app no longer monitors per app data consumption on the iOS6 platform.  Bummer because I was so hoping to figure out what is going on with my daughter's data usage.  Thanks anyway!