Email Issues: WiFi to Edge and back...

[leeladisky]

Okay,

So - I am trying to check my email on my servers at work and everything works perfectly when I use EDGE, however, when the phone connects to WiFi while at the office, I get an error: "Cannot find server, make sure the domain name is correct."

Is there something that I can do to allow the phone to connect to a server called "server2" via wifi and then the same server on Edge (using my domain name) without significant changes to my servers, infrastructure and without creating a 2nd email account on the phone just for when I am in the office?

Lee

 

[ColsTiger]

Okay,

So - I am trying to check my email on my servers at work and everything works perfectly when I use EDGE, however, when the phone connects to WiFi while at the office, I get an error: "Cannot find server, make sure the domain name is correct."

Is there something that I can do to allow the phone to connect to a server called "server2" via wifi and then the same server on Edge (using my domain name) without significant changes to my servers, infrastructure and without creating a 2nd email account on the phone just for when I am in the office?

Lee

That's a good question; unfortunately there's not really an easy answer. Because your ISP is not wanting you to access their server when you're off the network (your home ISP network), then you can only change your outgoing server settings to cwmx.com to send email when you're off the network. The only problem with this is that when you're connected to any wifi network (regardless of whether it's your home ISP provided network) you can't send mail over cwmx.com. You can only send it when you're on the Cingular/At&t data network (EDGE). With cwmx.com as your outgoing server settings, you can send email when you're not on wifi, but if you have your ISP's outgoing server settings, you can ONLY send email when you're on your home wifi network.

My suggestion is to get a gmail account and have all your ISP provided email sent to that address. You can receive and send from that anywhere regardless of Wifi or EDGE network. Also, the gmail spam settings are usually much better than your ISP's.

You can check the iPhone support discussion forum at Apple.com. There's several threads about this very issue.

Good luck!

 

[leeladisky]

That's a good question; unfortunately there's not really an easy answer. Because your ISP is not wanting you to access their server when you're off the network (your home ISP network), then you can only change your outgoing server settings to cwmx.com to send email when you're off the network. The only problem with this is that when you're connected to any wifi network (regardless of whether it's your home ISP provided network) you can't send mail over cwmx.com. You can only send it when you're on the Cingular/At&t data network (EDGE). With cwmx.com as your outgoing server settings, you can send email when you're not on wifi, but if you have your ISP's outgoing server settings, you can ONLY send email when you're on your home wifi network.

My suggestion is to get a gmail account and have all your ISP provided email sent to that address. You can receive and send from that anywhere regardless of Wifi or EDGE network. Also, the gmail spam settings are usually much better than your ISP's.

You can check the iPhone support discussion forum at Apple.com. There's several threads about this very issue.

Good luck!

Yes - but I had heard there is something that can be done within the network or router to help resolve this issue as it is an issue that exists on many devices, not just the iPhone, when they roam between WiFi networks and their home network.

Lee

 

[ColsTiger]

Yes - but I had heard there is something that can be done within the network or router to help resolve this issue as it is an issue that exists on many devices, not just the iPhone, when they roam between WiFi networks and their home network.

Lee

Well if you are talking about a MS Exchange server, then it could be completely different.

 

[leeladisky]

Well if you are talking about a MS Exchange server, then it could be completely different.

So... my mail server is hosted locally on the LAN as "server2" and on the Internet as "mail.XXXXXXXXXX.com". It's just a regular IMAP server. I really need to resolve this - everything works on Edge from the public internet. However, when I return to the office via WiFi nothing works! I can surf the net via WiFi, but cannot access my company mail server.

There has to be a way to resolve this issue without forklifts...Do I have to run my own DNS server?

 

[bbocaner]

The iPhone doesn't clear it's DNS cache after switching networks. So, if you switch to a network that's using split DNS and your mail server is internal, you're out of luck until such time as the entry in the cache disappears. Mine actually crashed twice and completely rebooted as I was experimenting with this trying to figure out what was wrong.

I dealt with it by creating an additional WVLAN that was outside of the firewall for the iPhone. Really, a corporate network should be using wireless with EAP authentication of some sort, which the iPhone doesn't support at all, so this is actually a more elegant solution that it would initially appear to be.