Another episode in the saga of my early iPhone machinations: IMAP email retrieval from a company Exchange server.

I’ve been trying to make IMAP happen for 3 days now. I know the Exchange server is set up correctly because:

• I can telnet to port 993, so the IMAP SSL port is open and correctly directed to Exchange;
• The helpdesk guys confirm my Exchange account is IMAP enabled;
• I can connect to the IMAP server both internally and externally using various desktop clients (Outlook 2007, Thunderbird).

Despite all this, the Exchange server just keeps on refusing my login. I tried all variations of the standard NTLM login details: username, domain\username, DOMAIN/username, etc.. Finally in a fit of desperation I tried my company email address as my login (e.g. username@domain.com). Bingo. After a very long wait, the iPhone accepted my credentials and presented me with a new mail account.

All good, except the work IMAP account was incredibly slow compared to GMail. The cause was probably about 100 ‘public folders’ listed every time the iPhone requested a folder list, instead of just my standard folders (Inbox, Personal, Trash, etc).

A quick Google turned up the answer to that one: a per-user setting in Exchange called “Include all public folders when a folder list is requested.” Perfect.

So now I had IMAP email from the company Exchange server flowing nicely into the iPhone. Unfortunately my company’s Exchange server doesn’t provide authenticated SMTP, and was quite correctly refusing my requests to send outbound email. After some struggling trying to get authenticated SMTP working, I gave up and went to the experts.

For the princely sum of US$14.95, I now have a lifetime Fastmail.fm account with the ability to authenticate against their SMTP server and send email from any network that takes my fancy. I prefer Fastmail’s SMTP option over GMail, because Fastmail will honor the original ‘from’ address. GMail on the other hand, will always say the email came from yourname@gmail.com, regardless of what iPhone account it came from. Not a good look when you’re sending corporate emails.

So there you have it. A stop-gap measure until the ‘real’ Exchange email sync comes out with the 2.0 iPhone firmware (or before if the hackers have their way).

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