I have the same problem. It's driving me up the walls. For such a slick phone, amazing hardware, to be so LIMITED when it comes to email is frankly shocking.

I firmly believe that this flaw will be the death of the N900. There is no way I can recommend this phone to people because of the atrocious email client. Previous to 1.2 I was telling people, "there's an update coming, it might be alright", now I'm just honest with them, "this phone can't handle email properly, stay away from it".

I wish I didn't have to say, but there's no way I'm going to recommend something this brutal.

And the frustrating thing is that there seems to be NOTHING that we, as a community, can do. The frustration of impotence!