Finally Found a Flaw with my iPhone

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.