Command Center

iPhone and POP3 Accounts

As providers of email facilities to business, Toucan Internet LLP is called upon to offer additional support for the many mobile devices that hang on the end of our services. Most of these have their own little foibles that, if you’re unaware of, can cost hours of lost time, raise your blood pressure to dangerous levels and leave you wondering why you ever upgraded in the first place. Don’t worry you’re not alone.
Some clients have issues connecting the iPhone to POP3 accounts, not because of the product itself, but rather the lack of configuration advice available to users. Having helped clients recently, this basic information may well be helpful to many.
If you have another device such as a main PC that is also collecting your email, then there can be clashes as the POP3 protocol that handles your mail can only service one device at one time, therefore if one is connected and the other one polls the mail box it will return an error as it cannot get access.
These are typical log errors that show the issue and your sysadmin people will be able to spot this:
Here we see the iPhone log in at 12:54:35 from IP address 212.183.140.122 and before that mail session has closed the office PC log has attempted a connection to the same account from 83.104.167.229. The office pc would report a connection error.
To avoid this being a continual issue one solution would be to only have the office PC collecting when you are there. There are countless other ways email accounts can be configured that we’ll not debate them all here, but rather flag up this iPhone/Mobile device and POP3 issue.
Particularly with the iPhone and the above configuration with an office PC on the same account it is important to set the iPhone push facility to “off”. From our experience if this is set to “on” the iPhone doesn’t close the session after polling the POP3 account therefore locking the mail box from access by other devices, such as the office PC.
Specific to Toucan Internet LLP POP3 accounts in the advanced settings set “SSL” to off. The SMTP authentication should be set to “password”.

Hi Simon
Thank you for your help and assistance with the iPhone4 queries, you have achieved in 5 minutes what Vodafone have taken over 2 hours to not resolve! I have discussed with them just now about Outlook needing to be closed to get emails on the iPhone and they have advised altering the Outlook settings to ‘keep the mail on the server’ which I have done and it appears to be working OK but goodness knows what else it will put out of sync!
 

REFERENCES
http://blog.toucan-group.com/2011/05/19/iphone-and-pop3-accounts/