Paul's Down-Home Page

Want to make your iPhone’s mail client fall over dead? Try opening a Word 2007 attachment. Works every time.

Technorati Tags: iPhone

So, I wrote an UPDATE column (URL forthcoming) on the good and bad of using an iPhone with an Exchange server. I was limited by space there, so consider this article a sidebar that goes in to more detail on specific things i liked, and disliked, about the iPhone+Exchange mail experience compared to the iPhone+IMAP one.

• The iPhone doesn’t expunge deleted messages properly. This is so 1985. There’s absolutely no excuse for Apple to have bobbled this, and I certainly hope they fix it soon (although there are workarounds).
• It’s wonderful to not have to worry about how much storage space to allocate to mail. With 8GB of space on the phone, I can easily have the full contents of my primary accounts, with subfolders. On the other hand, there’s no way to specify which folders you want to sync. I’ll call this one a tie.
• There’s no search tool on the iPhone– at all! If you don’t know exactly which message you want, too bad. You also can’t search across applications, something I miss in both WM and the iPhone after using it on Palm OS. By contrast, WM6 has the ability to use the server-side search catalog that Exchange maintains, and you can easily pull messages with search hits down to your device. Advantage: WM6.
• It’s much easier to navigate between folders and accounts on WM6. The iPhone requires multiple screen taps, and there’s no way to collapse folders. Advantage: WM6.
• The iPhone doesn’t do multiple selection, so you can’t delete or move messages en masse.
• no flagging on the iPhone. In fact, almost none of the message metadata you’d expect to be preserved (like forwarded/replied-to) is preserved. Only read/unread status is kept.
• The iPhone screen makes reading most HTML mail a pleasure. The rendering is quite good overall. Viagra spam has never looked so crisp or appealing.
• You can choose to check your accounts manually, or at intervals of 15, 30, or 60 minutes. That’s it. No separate schedules for separate accounts, and no other intervals. Big advantage WM6.
• The iPhone has limited support for reading Word and PDF attachments, but you can’t edit or create them. Big advantage: WM6.

Technorati Tags: iPhone

My iPhone still won’t reliably delete IMAP messages. There’s no way to tell the phone to empty its deleted items cache, and because I’m not using IMAP with either of my Exchange accounts on other machines, there’s no way to do it from there either. However, the folks at Fresh Logic have written a tool called expunge that looks like it might work. I’m going to give it a try.

Technorati Tags: iPhone

Dave Winer has a nifty idea: turn a news feed with RSS into a river of news. Think of an essentially endless web page, where the newest news articles are always on top. This is a perfect format for mobile devices, and in fact the iPhone provides a terrific browsing experience for Winer’s two river-oriented sites: the NY Times river and the BBC river. If you have an iPhone (or, what the heck; even if you don’t), give them a try. I think you’ll like what Dave’s done.

Technorati Tags: puppy

According to iTunes, I have 2879 items taking up 14.21GB in my iTunes library. Sadly, this is about five times as much free space as I have on my iPhone, which spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E for my plan to ditch my existing iPod. However, I hit on a useful strategy. I already have a playlist called “Never Played”, currently at about 2056 items. This is a little misleading, since I’ve actually played many of those songs between flattening my iPod, moving my music library, and so on. However, I now have a new rule. I have to listen only to that playlist. Any time I get the urge to skip a song, or find a song that I haven’t heard and don’t like, IT MUST GO. We’ll see how well this works to weed out stuff I wouldn’t listen to anyway.

Well, this is a pain in the butt: by default, when you create an IMAP or Exchange account on the iPhone, messages you delete aren’t ever actually purged from the server. The effect of this is that messages you delete on the iPhone don’t disappear from your Outlook/Entourage/Exchange ActiveSync/whatever mailbox, leading to angst if you’re trying to keep a tidy inbox.

The fix is simple, once you know it exists: Tap Settings > Mail, select the IMAP account, tap Advanced, then select the purge interval from the “Deleted Messages” group. (Apple has a cursory document on it here). The problem is that the shortest interval is 1 day– so when you remove a message on the iPhone, it will take 24hr to disappear from your other clients. This is a pretty poor “feature” and I’m disappointed that Apple didn’t take the time to implement proper deleted item purging as they do in Mail.app. Boo hiss.

Update: another annoyance is that the iPhone insists on creating its own Deleted Items folder in the Inbox. That’s just wrong. I suspect this can be fixed by modifying the server path prefix, but that shouldn’t be necessary. The whole point of having a defined account type for Exchange is to avoid this kind of problem (that’s why the iPhone correctly hides other folders, like Calendar and Contacts).

Technorati Tags: iPhone, Mac

You’re probably familiar with the idea that, for most companies, a relatively small percentage of customers generates a large percentage of revenue. This is particularly true for industries, like airlines, where pricing is highly variable. Looks like the same thing is true for mobile operators. Sprint Nextel has an innovative solution: find the customers who are costing you the most in support, then fire them. I wonder if this model will ever catch on in the software industry?