Getting Email Working on My Droid

Anyone who I have talked to in the last two weeks has heard me complain about the wonkiness of the non-Gmail app on my Droid. It was terrible - sometimes it would update and download email properly, sometimes it would not. Sometimes I had to power the phone off and back on to get it to start downloading the email properly.

I talked to a friend last night who is a long-time Android user and he said that he had always set up his email as IMAP. So I tried that and it worked! Hallelujah!

However sending email properly was not quite as easy. My work server apparently won't relay email from outside the network without a complex series of security settings which my phone doesn't have the sophistication to mimic.

So I tried to send my work email through my personal mail server. The server is smart enough to see that the "from" email address doesn't match the domain so it rejects it, or more specifically doesn't relay it at all.

So then I try to send through my Gmail account, which has worked well for other accounts in the past. The mail goes through, but Gmail changes the from, so instead of saying from "me@myjob.com," it says "from me@gmail.com."

I spent an hour wrestling with this last night, and I got one email through properly. Backtracking from that email I worked out a relatively simple hack. I have at least a half dozen Gmail accounts, and tried sending through all of them. The one that works has my "from" address at work set up as an identity. Thus Gmail does not change the address!

After two weeks I almost have my email working, with the exception that I dislike IMAP. But at least I can now reliably check my email. Not as easily as I would like but it works!

To recap, if you are having difficulty relaying your email through an SMTP server from an Android phone:

1. Set it to use your Gmail account as an SMTP (smtp.gmail.com, TLS security)
2. Make sure that the Gmail account you are using as login credentials has the email you want to send from set up as an identity.

One Week with the Droid

I've had the Droid for just about a week now and I think I've learned most of it's kinks and such. Here are my current thoughts:

This is a beautiful device. It is great at what it does. As a smartphone it is pretty much everything I could ask for. As a business device it is lacking however. My main complaints are with the keyboard, which as everyone has noted is completely atrocious. The touch screen is nice, I've learned to operate it with one hand somewhat.

My other complaint is with the native non-Gmail e-mail program. While the web browsing and Facebook apps and Twitter apps and navigation are beyond compare, the simple e-mail is severely lacking. This was my main use for my old phone - I used it to check email. It wasn't fancy, it didn't render the emails as nicely as the Droid does, but it was simple and effective.

In the morning I downloaded all my email from over the previous night, scrolled through it quickly, replied to anything important, deleted spam or unwanted email and that was it. Bing, bang, boom. Done. With the Droid and the native email program it is far more complex than that. I have to check each account individually, sometimes deleting an email doesn't delete it from the server like it should. Sometimes emails I mark as read come back later as unread. As a business tool the Droid's native email program is severely lacking.

The keyboard makes it very difficult to easily and quickly reply to emails and I find myself putting things off until I am in front of a real computer. The touch screen is kind of wonky - sometimes it's not sensitive enough and sometimes its too sensitive. About half of my emails end up getting sent before I am done with them because I accidentally brushed the screen the wrong way.

The Droid's integration with Google, and the way it integrates contacts, calendar, Twitter, Facebook, email, maps, navigation is incredible. I have no complaints with that whatsoever. I never had that on my old phone, it's nice, but I'd trade it all for a simple, working, basic email app.

I will start to look through the app store and see if I find anything. If I had a good email program this phone would be just about perfect.

Verizon Phones

Just got off the phone with Verizon Wireless and I asked about new phones they might be getting. The woman said that there is "speculation" about Verizon carrying the Pre but nothing concrete and I shouldn't count on it.

She flat out said that as far as she knows Verizon will NOT carry the iPhone. She said that was all rumors and it was probably not going to happen.

I asked about Android phones and she said she had not heard about that, but in terms of possibilities it was somewhere between the Pre (a matter of time) and the iPhone (not likely.)

She recommended the Blackberry Tour. I'm not a big Blackberry fan. We'll wait and see I guess.

Wednesday Round-up

Rupert might actually make the WSJ's content available for free! Joy! Oh wait... I hate reading papers online. Hurts my eyes and my brain. So... meh, I guess.

What the Rackspace transformer explosion might look like, via Valleywag.

Robert Scoble's comments on the gPhone.

Something about Facebook and OpenSocial. I really don't even read most of this stuff.

Apparently Internet advertising is huge and growing. Why can't I see some of those dollars? Please...

Google is trying to get people to develop software for it's new phone... But they haven't given out any phones or a single line of code yet. I don't even know that the phones exist. So you people have fun with that. Actually a few people do have the code or the phone or whatever it is.

Apparently Friendster could have bought Facebook back when they were starting out. Unfortunately for them they did not. However once Facebook crashes and burns they will be happy that they did not.