Some observations by me. I may be wrong as I am no coder/dev.

If you set the N9 to "Dont allow background connections" , and open the browser, it will initiate the appropriate connection and you can happily surf, and after some preset time, approx 30 secs, if you dont load any more pages, the connection is terminated. Same behaviour is seen with any other app that requests internet. I even tried this with a skype call, setting skype online when background connections are off, it connects Skype, loads contacts, I can call the contact, and after I disconnect the connection terminated in some time.

So my question is , why cant email be made behave the same way when "background connections" are off !! To be frank I really think this whole concept of background connections is crap. They (Nokia/maemo6/harmattan ) already seem to have a mechanism in the connections framework to detect when an app is requesting connectivity and subsequently invoke a connection, just that its not being used correctly.

In my opinion, we just need a global data on/off switch and thats it. All connections should be made on request by an app(s) and terminated after a preset idle time or when the app(s) exit. In this scheme, the worst that can happen is that some rogue/misbehaving app stays open (maybe in the background as a daemon) , and keep it connected all time, which is precisely what is happening now in the current scheme of things!!