Mobile Email Woes

The kids here at work (and by kids I mean my bosses) are using HTC Touch Pro phones (Windows Mobile 6.1) and we've recently changed over our email services to a new ISP. Turns out, changing the email accounts on the phones was a problem - I had email capabilities set up on the phones before I left for vacation a week ago - only to return to them not working.

What's worse is that it's only half-broken. Receiving email works either by IMAP or POP, but sending doesn't want to work at all. Makes it hard to troubleshoot when something works sort of.

Worse yet, trying all the same email settings in Outlook or Thunderbird or whatever your fancy works just fine too; problem then lies with either the phone, the carrier or the networks not playing nice.

Phone carrier blames the email provider, the email provider blames the phone carrier. Doesn't matter, the problem actually lies with the fact that Windows Mobile 6.1 is trying to allow the phone carrier to specify alternate SMTP servers (ie. use their own, to streamline network traffic), which sounds fine on paper, but in fact is a headache when the carriers don't bother to do this. In that instance, a blank value is added for the alternate SMTP server, which essentially disables SMTP on that email account on the phone.

The issue identified, there is a Windows Mobile hotfix from Microsoft for the problem:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=d9d71b2e-d2dd-44f2-86e5-1e53aad7fb7a&displaylang=en

5 minutes to install per phone, include a phone reboot. Mail sends fine after that. I have heard, but not verified, that the hotfix needs to be reinstalled after adding another email account.

This is all a fine example of a bug being introduced when trying to add "features" or "make things simpler". How about next time we just add a checkbox to the account setup page on the phone that says "Use the damn server settings I specify and don't try to get smart about it."