About a month ago, my HTC Touch running Windows Mobile 6.1 on Verizon crashed while I was reading my email. I finished reading my messages when the phone rebooted, but the phone kept displaying one unread message. It bothered me, but I couldn’t find a solution online. I learned to live with it, and stopped getting excited when the Touch reported one new email. That is, until it happened again last night, but this time with text messages.

I text a lot. It’s the primary reason I own a mobile device — I don’t like talking to people I can’t see. I turn my ringer off when I am at work, so it is very important to me to have an accurate unread text message count. I searched again, but this time I found something: FixUnreadCount by R. Elmer. I am not sure how it works, but it resets the unread count for email and text messages. I am not sure if it sets them all to zero, or if it knows how many messages you’ve truly read. In my case it didn’t matter. I set off in search of the application.

Unfortunately, the file was hard to find for download. Every major software download site had a link to the author’s comcast.net page, which was dead. I eventually found the application on the XDA forum, but you have to be a member (free) to download it.

I ran the 9K executable on my phone. The application dutifully reported the status of unread messages on every email account I had. Windows Mobile reports Gmail labels as “folders,” so FixUnreadCount scoured them, too. After it churned through my email accounts, it set its sights on my text message account. I rebooted my phone and held my breath.

Zoink! No more unread messages. The wrong notifications were fixed.

Talk about the wonder of the Internet. Before the Web, this may have never been resolved. According to my research, Verizon either doesn’t acknowledge this problem or doesn’t have a fix for it. Microsoft apparently fixed this bug before Windows Mobile 5.x came out, but it was re-introduced with 6.1 and has yet to be fixed. Some random, bright person had the ability to fix this problem, and then made it available for free. I hope R. Elmer doesn’t mind that I’ve hosted it here, so that future people plagued by this problem can find it more easily:

http://drfaulken.com/files/FixUnreadCount.zip

Thanks, R. Elmer. :)