mtech

iPhone email and self-signed mail server certificates

After obtaining an iphone, one of the first things I wanted to do with it was setup email access. I found that setting it up with gmail access was really easy, so I wanted to set up access to our own rawthought email server.

I initially had some problems where the email setup complained "Secure Connection Failed: The certificate for mail.rawthought.com may be invalid." As Scott Gruby points out, this seems to be due to the fact that our server's certificate is self-signed.

However, I did find a workaround to this problem. After you get this first "Secure Connection Failed" dialog and click Continue, the iPhone email client tries various other ways to connect to your email server. This can take about five minutes, even with a WiFi connection, and a status dialog will read "Verifying IMAP account information". Finallly it will prompt you: "Cannot Connect Using SSL: Do you want to try setting up the account without SSL?"

If you say Yes to this dialog, setup will actually succeed. You might assume that this means that SSL security is permanently turned off for this email account. However, if you look at Settings -> Mail and look at the "Use SSL" toggle under "Incoming Settings", you'll see that SSL is turned ON.

While I haven't used a network analyzer to see exactly what's going on here, it appears that clicking Yes in the "Cannot Connect Using SSL" dialog causes the email client to accept the self-signed certificate. Subsequent mail checks work OK.

Transferring contacts from Nokia E70 to iPhone

One of the first things most iPhone buyers will want to do is synchronize contacts from their old phones to their fancy new iPhone. I wanted to do this...but it turns out that iSync on pre-Leopard Mac OS X doesn't support the Nokia E70 (my previous phone). Thus I'd be stuck with no way to transfer my old phone numbers, email addresses, and so forth, from my E70.

Then I found a hack for how to add support for the Nokia E70 to iSync. After setting this up, synchronizing with iSync, and then synchronizing Contacts with the iPhone, I found that my contacts were all slurped onto my new phone.

The first useful Android development forum

Anyone who reads the android developers Google group has probably been frustrated by the high question-to-answer ratio.

anddev.org has emerged as the first truly useful third-party android developer forum. The code samples and tools posted here are meaty and actually work.