• After 15+ years, we've made a big change: Android Forums is now Early Bird Club. Learn more here.

Help Losing Connection To Email When Shifting Between Wifi Routers

mcknigs

Member
Nov 18, 2009
86
3
When I go between connecting to wifi at work, home and neighbor's houses, I frequently lose the ability to connect to email accounts and Facebook. That is, I leave the vicinity of one wifi router, arrive at another, the phone finds it and connects, but I'm unable to connect to mail servers or Facebook for up/downloading data. Facebook tells me I have no access to internet, despite being connected to the local wifi router. Attempts to sync email accounts fail. Attempts to send mail result in those messages going to outboxes where they remain stuck until I cycle power on the phone. I can sometimes establish connections by shutting down wifi and using 4G. Sometimes I actually have to shut off wifi and reboot to 4G before I can connect with these apps. Other apps (e.g., browser) seem to work fine.

Android version is 4.1.2. The Facebook version is 2.1, which is old but I'd like to avoid newer versions since I've heard bad reviews. The mail app is the native app that came with the phone.

Any ideas as to what may be going on here?

-Scott
 
No response to this after a month so I'll bump it and add this question. Cycling power on the phone seems to help. I suspect what's happening is that the phone is still trying to communicate via the IP address it received from the last router to which it connected. This might explain why Facebook and email apps aren't connecting, but not why it passes the LTE On/Off app's "ping test". Is there something short of cycling power that I can do to get the phone to drop the IP address it's using and get a new one? Neither turning wifi off/on nor turning airplane mode on/off seem to work reliably, though maybe I'm not giving them enough time.

Edit: FWIW, I've received an updated router since the first post and the problem persists.

-Scott
 
Upvote 0

BEST TECH IN 2023

We've been tracking upcoming products and ranking the best tech since 2007. Thanks for trusting our opinion: we get rewarded through affiliate links that earn us a commission and we invite you to learn more about us.

Smartphones