iPhone and Email

If you're struggling with getting email operational on your iPhone I sympathise. Over the last week I've been trying to configure an iPhone for a client and it hasn't been easy. So. let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was client.

Client is highly mobile, both by profession but also for the short term by home. Having just moved out of his old flat he's living temporarily in another in central London prior to relocating to a new home. So, no permanent internet connection and the iPhone seemed ideal. First problem - you can't register an iPhone unless you can connect via broadband but I'll skip that one.

So there I am, in flat, trying to connect to client's BT internet account. Several hours later, no connection. Decided to give up on that. Persuaded client that he could live with another email address and so went to Yahoo to get an identity he could use from the phone. Yahoo is one of the providers pre-configured into the iPhone, so what could go wrong? All you have to do is enter three variables, and wait while the setup is validated. Error message. Try again (and again and again) thinking I must have typed in the password wrong but everytime it refused to validate the account. Some hours after the start of a simple job (with client naturally losing confidence in me) we've achieved nothing.

Will this thing handle mail at all? I tried my own email account (Gmail), another pre-configured option on the iPhone - and had access to my mail in seconds. Went to Yahoo.com via Safari and could see client's account, so I was sure the account name, password etc were accurate. Decided to ditch Yahoo and get a Gmail account. Thankfully Safari allowed me to do that. Went back into the iPhone Settings menu to add the new Gmail account, just a few entries, and pressed the save button. As with Yahoo the iPhone goes away to validate the email account. Or not, which is what it did. Except this time Google actually gave me a meaningful error message - I needed to switch on Pop email in my Google account preferences. Thanks Google, some feedback I could understand.

So back into Safari to attend to the message, which is done via the options settings in Gmail. Just click on a couple of links - except I couldn't get the iPhone's Safari clicks to activate the final link on Gmail. Incidentally doing this highlighted how excruciatingly slow the iPhone can be, it was painful. So there I was, no response from the iPhone and no broadband from which I could talk to Gmail. Thankfully my son Tim works in London, for an American technology company and answered my call. He activated clients Pop settings in a few seconds. Bingo, we finally had email on the iPhone, and a happy client.

That's more or less the end of the story, except an update from the Apple store in Lakeside. I asked one of their people if he was aware of a problem configuring the iPhone to use Yahoo mail. He wasn't but did an internet search to find an answer. We found a post suggesting that the Yahoo setting should not be what the iPhone default and manual says, but should be something like "pop.mail.yahoo.com" amd "smtp.mail.yahoo.com" instead. This makes more sense, but its undocumented and leaves me with the feeling either that I'm the first person to try to connect to a Yahoo account from an iPhone, or that Apple haven't tested this here in the UK (scary).