[Discuss] Push technology for mobile - iPhone woes

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

I ran into an astoundingly poor combination of problems when attempting to set
up "push technology" for mobile email.  Net result:  iPhone 4 bricked.

My goal was this: to make my latest iPhone get my home email immediately upon
delivery, in the way my old Android used to work and in the way my work email
(Microsoft Exchange-based) transmits immediately.

My home email is on a dovecot/postfix mail server configured to serve via imap.

I found a tool called Z-push on SourceForge.  According to the docs, it
provides an activesync URL compatible with most mobile phones.  After some
fiddling with PHP configs (and googling for troubleshooting info, which boils
down to making sure to enable generation of a debug.txt output file), I
seemingly got that part to work (though I have no independent way to test it).

Then I tried setting up the iPhone, under 5.0.1.  In the mail accounts screen,
if you set server type to imap, it doesn't give you the option to set the
fetch mode to "push".  So I created another mail account as server type
Exchange.  Once I did that, email stopped working.  Period.  No receiving, no
transmitting on any of my accounts, no ability to remove the mail account
setting -- because the menu itself gets locked, so you can't get into the
screen where you'd have a "delete this account" button.

Googling for this bug in the IOS 5.x setup screens, I find sparse reports that
indicate others have had this problem, but nothing official from Apple--and
after an upgrade to 5.1.1, I concluded that it's not fixed yet.  The only way
to clear the mail-account entry (according to the first genius-bar staffer I
asked, and no others were available) is to restore to factory configs and
restore to your most recent backup taken prior to hosing the setup screen (in
my case, a week ago).

So, I'm posting here as a warning to other Linux email admins:  if you're
trying to get current-generation iPhones set up to handle "push" mail, you'll
risk having to restore your phone(s).  Unless you have access to better
information than I do about setting all this up.

I think I'm *done* with trying to set up "push" mail on an iPhone.  Android's
suddenly looking more attractive.

-rich
P.S.  How did I brick the iPhone?  By trying to do an O/S reinstall from
iTunes running on a Windows virtual machine from within VirtualBox.  The USB
driver seems to be stable for everything else, but it won't perform a restore
from recovery mode.  So now I have to wait until I have access to a true-blue
Mac, and run a 30-minute reinstall, before I can use the phone again.