Update: Rocketship Apple: email…

As I said before in what turned out to be a long-ish post (!), I have been having all sorts of problems with the POP email handling of the iPhone email client – a problem made all the more ironic by the fact that the mail client (when working) is really very good!

(Just for information: currently configured, I have two POP accounts, one googlemail account, running in the mail client of v2.1 firmware on the iPhone 3G)

What I had previously seen is that the email retrieval and sending is unreliable – well I’d like to qualify that a bit further…

Typically, I can mostly get email from one of the email servers I use (more often than not, anyway), but sometimes it doesn’t work (and that occurrence is random). If I create a mail from inside an account and send it, that often doesn’t work.

But here’s the real kicker – ready? – if I try to reply to a mail that I have just collected, often whilst the 3G connection is still active, it NEVER sends the reply! I’ve been able to replicate this consistently…

My take on this? Partly as before, that in implementing Exchange support, they broke the main email client functionality badly. My more qualified take now? There is something very wrong with the underlying spooling function of the client, which means that both from a network access perspective, and from a timing perspective, it is tripping over itself. Clearly if you have an active 3G connection, once email has been polled, it should be possible to send/reply easily. And likewise, from a timing perspective, regular mail polling should be simple. But whatever has happened to the mail client is in fact so major, that it’s functionality is pretty much blown away. Yet, when you can read the emails you have got, they look great and render superbly.

I am told by an expert friend of mine, that if I were running an Exchange mail account, I wouldn’t be seeing any of this behaviour – I don’t doubt him, and believe that Exchange users might have the only functioning part of the mail client currently. But what about the rest of us Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)? We really need to get email back up and working – and fast! Heeeeeelp.

Whilst we are on the subject – two other faults with the email client:

(1) it won’t implement a different ‘reply-to’ email address – if you are sending through an email proxy (like googlemail) or perhaps just direct from the iPhone, you might want to change your ‘from’ address (commonly called ‘reply-to’ address in email terminology) – this is possible on most PC/web clients I have used, but on very few mobile clients – including the iPhone – why there isn’t a button to choose which address you want to include, from the accounts you have on the device, is completely beyond me….

(2) it only has a singular ‘global’ signature for email – this means it is only possible to implement a single signature on the device, which is then applied to the outgoing emails from ALL accounts – not very intelligent…