I was pleased to see that 2.1 may have addressed POPmail connectivity
issues, but the massively annoying SMTP problems remain - although I'm
now thinking that these are AT&T's problems rather than Apple's,
because they occur randomly.

I updated to 2.1 when it came out, and spent the rest of the day
impressed with the fact that I was now getting my mail easily every
time I pulled it from my POP and IMAP accounts. I didn't have the
opportunity to send much mail, but what I did, moved along as
expected.

Seeing improvement, I thought I'd go back to using my own network's
SMTP server. I have posted elsewhere that previously, using my own
network's SMTP server, every now and then sending mail would fail with
a message "Cannot send mail because a recipient address is invalid"
(when, of course, I know that all the addresses are valid, and they
all worked at other times). Many people responded that they were
experiencing the same issues.

Naturally, in true Apple fashion, no other information is given in
these instances, such as which of the addresses is the "invalid" one
or why, and one does not have the option of re-sending failed mail.

As I say, this seems more and more to be AT&T's network problem. The
only solution is to use the AT&T SMTP server (cwmx.com) as the primary
for all outgoing mail on all accounts.

There are also some other weird, buggy things in mail set up that most
definitely ARE Apple's fault, such as the fact that every time a
change is made to the SMTP configuration, it remains a part of the set
up, and cannot be removed unless the account is deleted and
reconfigured. The mail application arbitrarily changes the order of
servers for reasons I haven't been able to figure out, and there are
other annoyances that I'm sure many have encountered.

Additionally, E-mailing photos still takes me up to 10 minutes to
transmit, but you cannot yet send more than one photo per mail, nor
can you send a second photo until the first is transmitted.

And sending even ordinary mail still takes up to a minute to transmit
after hitting "send".

I'm certain that my experience cannot be unique, but if anyone else
has been experiencing any or all of these problems, I'd be curious to
know whether it's their opinion that the problems are in the
application or the network.

Thanks in advance.

DGI



See More: Major iPhone SMTP problems remain post 2.1