Last night, Microsoft finally came forward to confirm allegations that Yahoo Mail was ultimately the service responsible for elevated Windows Phone 7 data usage. While the company initially held off on fingering the offender, after publication of log analysis showing the unusual behavior of Yahoo’s servers, Microsoft could no longer keep the secret. CNET reports that Yahoo has now made an apology for this incident, and expects a fix to be ready in a few weeks.

While downplaying the seriousness of the issue, which Yahoo describes as an “inefficiency” that affected only a fraction of its users, the company is nonetheless owning up to its role. A promised fix should be coming in some weeks’ time; that could put it in the timeline with the expected WP7 update. It would be unfortunate if waiting to bundle with that patch is the reason for the delay, since it seems like the obvious solution would be for Yahoo to configure its Mail servers to simply not return the extraneous data causing these problems.

Until Yahoo gets its act together, there are some actions you can take to minimize the impact of this situation on your data plan. Microsoft suggests following these steps:

1. On the Start screen of Windows Phone 7, click on the arrow at the top right

2. Choose “Settings” from the app list

3. Choose “email & accounts”

4. Choose “Yahoo! Mail”

5. Click on the setting under “Download new content”

6. Select a less frequent setting. If you are using the default setting (every 2 hours), change this setting to ‘manually’

7. Click on the setting under “Download email from”

8. Select a shorter time range. If you are using the default setting (the last 2 weeks), change this setting to ‘the last 7 days’

Source: CNET