iPhone: Trapped inside your company’s firewall?

The joy of finding out your can log onto your company’s wireless network may be short lived if you discover you’re now trapped inside their firewall. You’ll likely be able to browse the internet but you’ll probably not be able to send nor clear your external email using the iPhone’s Mail application.

You could ask your networking people to open up the appropriate ports, but let’s get serious here — they shut them down for security reasons in the first place.

On the up side, you’ll be able to clear your company’s internal email and browse your intranet — without having to VPN in!

So how might you work around this? You could consider trying to tunnel out of your company’s network by subscribing to a personal VPN service like witopia.net — something I thought of doing but did not try. Of course you’ll need your networking people to open some ports, of the less vulnerable kind, which hopefully they may be inclined to do for you. Witopia’s very responsive support people say it’s an iffy endeavor: It works for some and not for others. With their full money back guarantee it may be worth testing.

Let’s look at using your browser to access webmail …

iPhone Mail “this message has not been downloaded from the server” …

After returning my first iPhone last year, a feeling not unlike taking a terminally ill puppy off to be euthanised, I’m testing the new 3G iPhone this summer. Straight out of the box Mail is set up to retrieve Gmail via POP (the default setup offered by the iPhone’s Mail application) which won’t fully retrieve longer emails from the server, resulting in “this message has not been downloaded from the server” errors. Did I have another sick puppy on my hands?

Fortunately not. Gmail now offers an IMAP alternative to POP, the chief benefit of which is to keep your emails synchronised across several clients (e.g. your desktop, your laptop and your iPhone) — when you’ve read an email on one, it’s marked as read on all the others. If you file or delete email on one, it’s similarly filed or deleted on the others. Unfortunately the default Mail setup for Gmail on the iPhone assumes you’ll be retrieving email via POP.

As a bonus feature, I’ll remind you how to specify a different “from” email address than the Gmail account you’re specifying — in case you’re forwarding from another email account through Gmail for spam filtering, archiving and/or to circumvent having to VPN into your corporate email account.

So here’s what you need to do, in two parts …