Email – IMAP / VPN / AT&T SMTP

This is my initial foray into email and what I’ve been using for about a week.  I’m using IMAP to connect the native iPhone mail client to my mailbox. 

There are tons of articles that will show you how to do this, so I won’t go into the details on how to do this.  But if you’re looking for some, you can check out what Chris Linwood and Andy Brunner suggest.  I’ve connected enough mail clients to enough IMAP servers that I really didn’t need any examples to do it.  We’ve already been running IMAP on our main Domino server for some time (for among other reasons, we have intranet applications that monitor certain group mailboxes).  Note that we are not running IMAP over SSL because right now we are not allowing IMAP through the firewall.  For that reason, I’m using the iPhone’s VPN client to access our IMAP server.

As for SMTP, I’m using the AT&T SMTP server that my phone came configured with.  Now, so far I haven’t had any problems using AT&Ts server.  I’ll be sure to update this post if anyone’s spam filter balks at my mail. 

Now, do I think this is enterprise class?  No, not really.  It’s fine for me; I don’t have much of a problem VPNing into our network to get mail.  But I realize that I probably can’t put this thing in the hands of a VP of Sales and expect him to dig down into Settings to connect to our VPN.  He’s going to hit the Mail icon on the home screen, then wonder where his new mail is.  It wouldn’t be bad if we could get the Mail client to automatically connect to our VPN.  It might even be OK if there were a VPN connection icon on the home screen (many of our clients’ execs regularly connect to our VPN on their laptops).  But digging down into Settings to get to it?  No bueno.  Also, when I move messages out of my Inbox and into folders on the iPhone, the messages stay in my Inbox in Lotus Notes.  Plus, I don’t have access to our corporate address book.  Right now, I’d say this is for l33t HAxoRs only.