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Tuesday, March 11, 2008

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Finally Found a Flaw with my iPhone

- Sierra Modro

When I bought my new iPhone on Sunday, I was very excited. I have used it quite a bit over the last couple of days and the overall user experience has been excellent.

Then I tried to send an email on my Yahoo! Small Business email account.

Now, to be fair, the problem has nothing to do with my iPhone exactly. It's a Yahoo! issue, but given the outstanding integration that Apple has managed in so many areas, this is a glaring hole.

Yahoo! supports a kind of push email specifically for the iPhone. It's an advertised service and one that works quite well. I have a free Yahoo! email account and it works just great with the push email. This is (very!) loosely based on IMAP and some backend magic from Apple, but from the user perspective, it's seamless.

I also have a Yahoo! Small Business account. This is a paid service. I get my own domain name, some server storage space, and web hosting stuff. It's not a great value anymore; I got it nearly 5 years ago and have just kept giving them money to maintain it. When I set up my spandy new iPhone, I selected the Yahoo! account set up because, well, it's a Yahoo! account and I want push mail. I started reading mail and it worked great. IMAP is so much nicer than POP mail - faster and I know exactly what email I need to read.

Then I tried to send an email. No go. "Cannot Send Mail. The connection to the outgoing server "(null)" failed. " With the special push mail setup, I have no way to change my outgoing mail server or change the settings, so I can't actually fix this with push mail.

I have a workaround - the kind that makes every techie cringe. I have set up my push mail and I will read mail there. I have also set up a POP version of my Yahoo! Small Business account. From the POP version I can set up the outgoing mail server properly and get the capability to send mail. This takes memory (of which I have plenty - I love having 16GB on my phone!) and it's tedious, but it should work.

I have also complained bitterly to Yahoo! Small Business. I should be able to have all of the features on my paid account that I have on my free account. That's just plain silly.

Technorati Tags: iPhone,Yahoo,push+mail,IMAP

Sierra Modro | Apple | Yahoo

3/11/2008 5:30 PM MST

Finally Found a Flaw with my iPhone Comments [9] | Digg This | del.icio.us | Citations

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 6:14:23 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

I'm genuinely sorry to hear about the annoyance, Sierra. Actually, I have found that Apple has poorly implemented the SMTP protocol for sending mail.

At work, I have an Exchange 2007 server. For Windows Mobile phones, we use ActiveSync, but IMAP and SMTP are opened up Blackberries and iPhones. The Blackberries work fine for sending/receiving mail, but while the iPhone can receive mail-- it cannot send mail. My boss and I tried several "solutions" that all failed for our environment (requires secure authentication), but we had to setup a second less-secured SMTP service to accommodate it.

GoodThings2Life

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 6:44:50 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

GT2L - I have to agree with you. The configuration options on the email client are lacking, including security. While that isn't as much of an issue with me, I have to think that it is something they will address with the highly-anticipated June update.

Sierra Modro

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 9:02:47 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

He iphone does not have 16gb of "memory" it has 128mb of ram and 16gb of flash storage!

anon

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 1:09:17 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

There isn't any special thing between apple and yahoo. Yahoo Mail works on IMAP on Windows Mobile phones too with the same Direct Push features, and I use it everyday. You should get your facts right.

anaon

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 7:04:49 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

anon: You are correct in spirit, but the official terminology is "flash memory".

Sumocat

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 9:59:19 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Anon - I was lax in my writing. It is more precise to say that the iPhone has 16GB of storage. On my WM phone, the program memory space and the program storage space co-mingle so much that I was always hitting my limits on both. Not everything can successfully run on an SD card on the 8525, so many apps had to be installed in the main memory/storage. On the iPhone, I don't have that same space limitation. With 16GB of storage space via flash memory, I don't have to worry about how much space my email is taking up. That is a relief.

Sierra Modro

Wednesday, March 12, 2008 10:17:08 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Anaon- Yahoo! email does not officially support IMAP on any of its clients, free or paid. Yahoo! only officially supports POP. This is pretty clear in the Yahoo! Help system. There are some unsupported third party solutions for supporting IMAP on Yahoo!, but no direct support. Yahoo! has had a couple of trials of IMAP in the past, but they closed down pretty quickly. However, using POP with the email polling available on Windows Mobile does give a decent email response. It's just not real Push mail. I have to wait for the polling period to know that I have new email; it doesn't just come immediately.

For the iPhone, Yahoo! set up a new service through imap.apple.yahoo.com. This was covered in the Apple press release. Even this isn't full, true IMAP access since it doesn't follwo the IMAP standard, but it's closer at least. This allows actual PUSH mail, versus the polling every few minutes to see if new mail has come in. There is a great article over at Bynkii that describes the POP, IMAP, and Yahoo! Push mail differences.

Sierra Modro

Monday, March 24, 2008 9:57:59 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

I am really in favor of yahoo web hosting . They provide some great features . I have tried another web hosting also . But personally yahoo web hosting works best for me . I have also created one lens on yahoo web hosting . Hey , by the way , nice blog my friend

Yahoo Web Hosting

Wednesday, March 26, 2008 12:46:32 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Well my small business mail wont send at all, so consider yourself lucky.

nate

Comments are closed.