The PocketTV Team
06-24-2006, 05:17 AM
we found a bug with the Smartphone Email application that prevents using some SMTP servers.
well in fact the bug is probably general to all Windows Mobile Smartphone (and maybe to all Windows Mobile devices including Pocket PCs), but we tested it and confirmed it on the Motorola Q.
the bug prevents using some login names on SMTP (i.e. outgoing email) servers that require authentication and when the SMTP login name is something like '[email protected]' i.e. when the login name contains an '@' sign.
this type of server login name is common on servers that use shared domains on a single IP address, and this is a common case. in this case, since there may be several users with the same name under different domains (on the same server), the correct user is identified by using the domain name with the '@' sign.
in fact we found that bug by trying to configure the Motorola Q to use one of our email servers to send my email.
what happens is that the Smartphone email client removes the @ sign and everything that follows it when loging to the SMTP server - we confirmed that by looking in real time in the log files produced by our SMTP server.
i am not aware of any workaround. once again, MSFT is trying to be "smart" i.e. they assume that the @xxx.yyy part in the login name of the SMPT server (i.e. outgoing) was entered by mistake by the user, but being too smart is not always a good thing.
note that using fully-qualified user-name that include a mandatory @domain part is very common and even google's gmail uses this, as you can see in the 'Account Name' section of http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13287 .
So if you use gmail to both receive and send email, it will work, but if you want to use gmail just to send (i.e. SMTP), and use another server to receive (i.e. POP3 or IMAP4), then it won't work, because of that bug. try it, you'll see...
well in fact the bug is probably general to all Windows Mobile Smartphone (and maybe to all Windows Mobile devices including Pocket PCs), but we tested it and confirmed it on the Motorola Q.
the bug prevents using some login names on SMTP (i.e. outgoing email) servers that require authentication and when the SMTP login name is something like '[email protected]' i.e. when the login name contains an '@' sign.
this type of server login name is common on servers that use shared domains on a single IP address, and this is a common case. in this case, since there may be several users with the same name under different domains (on the same server), the correct user is identified by using the domain name with the '@' sign.
in fact we found that bug by trying to configure the Motorola Q to use one of our email servers to send my email.
what happens is that the Smartphone email client removes the @ sign and everything that follows it when loging to the SMTP server - we confirmed that by looking in real time in the log files produced by our SMTP server.
i am not aware of any workaround. once again, MSFT is trying to be "smart" i.e. they assume that the @xxx.yyy part in the login name of the SMPT server (i.e. outgoing) was entered by mistake by the user, but being too smart is not always a good thing.
note that using fully-qualified user-name that include a mandatory @domain part is very common and even google's gmail uses this, as you can see in the 'Account Name' section of http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13287 .
So if you use gmail to both receive and send email, it will work, but if you want to use gmail just to send (i.e. SMTP), and use another server to receive (i.e. POP3 or IMAP4), then it won't work, because of that bug. try it, you'll see...