So, being a bit of a practical soul, I let my buddy be the guinea pig and buy the iPhone yesterday and I stuck with my Treo for the time being. We went through the whole activation and setup deal last night and for the most part, things went smooth.
The one mega-problem so far (the potential "deal-breaker" for him) was that we couldn't get push email to work. For reasons that are absolutely beyond me, Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided not to implement standard IMAP IDLE push, like ChatterEmail and similar programs use, and instead has implemented a non-standard (or rather, rejected standard) called P-IMAP, or Push IMAP.
Maybe we are missing something here, but we tried two providers that work with ChatterEmail on Treo and implement IMAP IDLE just fine (Fastmail, Tuffmail), and they both get email to the iPhone, but there is no pushing at all.
To the best of my ability to tell, there are no normal, standard Unix email server programs that support this variant P-IMAP. So while all of us with Treos have been enjoying push email with the email service providers of our choice, iPhone users seem to be stuck with using Yahoo's Push Email service which does implement this P-IMAP service? Strike one for the iPhone - this results in almost a total write-off of this device for me as it is.
Now, problem #2. Assuming you have a Yahoo email account, and are willing to trust Yahoo as your primary mobile email provider, I see no documentation stepping people through the process of pulling email from your main email account and then push it out to your snazzy new iPhone. So I'm assuming I have to set up my primary email service to forward copies of emails (that pass through my spam filters) to Yahoo mail, set up my Yahoo account on my iPhone, and then hopefully it will just work?
This is a total pain in the ***. Anybody have a push email setup working on their iPhone via Yahoo or other?
If I'm missing something here, please tell me. I really, really want to be wrong about this so I can go ahead and get an iPhone for myself.
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Update: He just emailed me that he got push working with Yahoo mail. Still, the email situation sort of sucks, and the total lack of documentation/information sucks worse. Maybe I just wasn't born to be a Mac fanboy.
The one mega-problem so far (the potential "deal-breaker" for him) was that we couldn't get push email to work. For reasons that are absolutely beyond me, Apple, in their infinite wisdom, decided not to implement standard IMAP IDLE push, like ChatterEmail and similar programs use, and instead has implemented a non-standard (or rather, rejected standard) called P-IMAP, or Push IMAP.
Maybe we are missing something here, but we tried two providers that work with ChatterEmail on Treo and implement IMAP IDLE just fine (Fastmail, Tuffmail), and they both get email to the iPhone, but there is no pushing at all.
To the best of my ability to tell, there are no normal, standard Unix email server programs that support this variant P-IMAP. So while all of us with Treos have been enjoying push email with the email service providers of our choice, iPhone users seem to be stuck with using Yahoo's Push Email service which does implement this P-IMAP service? Strike one for the iPhone - this results in almost a total write-off of this device for me as it is.
Now, problem #2. Assuming you have a Yahoo email account, and are willing to trust Yahoo as your primary mobile email provider, I see no documentation stepping people through the process of pulling email from your main email account and then push it out to your snazzy new iPhone. So I'm assuming I have to set up my primary email service to forward copies of emails (that pass through my spam filters) to Yahoo mail, set up my Yahoo account on my iPhone, and then hopefully it will just work?
This is a total pain in the ***. Anybody have a push email setup working on their iPhone via Yahoo or other?
If I'm missing something here, please tell me. I really, really want to be wrong about this so I can go ahead and get an iPhone for myself.
------------------------
Update: He just emailed me that he got push working with Yahoo mail. Still, the email situation sort of sucks, and the total lack of documentation/information sucks worse. Maybe I just wasn't born to be a Mac fanboy.