EricBlog

iPhone bug? Maybe, but not bugging me now.

I'm working with Apple support to try and figure out why I can't send mail from my iPod anywhere other than at home. As far as I can tell so far, this is because the iPod will not save the outgoing SMTP server password for my IMAP account. I can see the authentication failure in the server logs showing that an unauthenticated request for relay was received from the iPhone, and no matter how many different ways I try, I cannot get the outgoing SMTP password to save. So far Apple support has been very pleasant to deal with. I repeated all my diagnostic steps (and reloading the firmware) with level 1 support, then declined to wait an hour for L2 (this was on July 3rd). I called back on the 5th and talked to L2 for 20 minutes, and they're researching the problem now; I expect a call back tonight. Not too bad.

Update: I worked with two different folks in Apple support. During diagnosis with the second-line support person, I changed the SMTP configuration several times for testing. For some reason, the last configuration change (to get the exact error message) resulted in the password being saved, and SMTP working like a champ. No problems sending mail from the iPhone now.