5. Getting Your Outgoing Mail Server To Work

Are you having trouble getting your outgoing server to work? Most of the problems people have are related to the fact that when they’re on a different network than their home network, with different IP addresses and firewalling, they cannot access the same outgoing server as when they are on their home network. I won’t go into all of the details, but I have found a solution that seems to work.

AuthSMTP sells access to their outgoing server. Prices are fair and you won’t be locked out, as long as you have a valid user id and password and whatever network you are using at any given time doesn’t keep you from accessing AuthSMTP’s network. Check them out.

Composing A Message

I also like the way a list of possible recipients is generated as you’re adding to the To or Cc field in a new message. I have nearly 200 entries in my contacts and within one or two keystrokes the correct contact shows up in the list. All you have to do is touch the correct contact and it pops into the field where your cursor is.

One final note on email, I am not happy that messages only have To and Cc fields. There is no Bcc field.

The Keyboard

I’ve gotten much better at typing on the iPhone’s graphical keyboard. I can even type passwords accurately. Every time you hit a key, a balloon pops up from the key showing you which key you hit. The character in the balloon is much larger than it is on the keyboard. This helps improve accuracy as do the tips I gave you in my first look review of the iPhone.

I’ve also started getting into using double taps to zoom in and out on a screen. It’s really great and works in most applications. You can still use the old two-finger gesture to zoom in and out, but double tapping is easier and thus faster. Also, I’m really getting into the iPhone’s text completion capability. While you’re typing a word it shows you the word it thinks you’re after and if it’s right and you press the space bar, the word is placed into the text.

One great tip from David Pogue of the New York Times: If you need to insert a period or any other character on the numbers and symbols keyboard, touch the key for that keyboard and keep your finger on the display. Then slide over to the character you need and take your finger off the display. The character is inserted and the alphabetic keyboard returns automatically. This is much nicer than pressing a key to bring up the numeric and symbols keyboard, lifting your finger and typing the character and then having to press a key to return to the alphabetic keyboard.

By the way, Pogue is writing the "missing manual" for the iPhone. It will be available as an Adobe PDF very soon and as a printed book in August. Check out for more.

Web Browsing With Safari

Safari is very well designed. So, far, except for Exchange Server Web access, everything I’ve thrown at it has worked fine. It synchronizes your desktop or mobile computer’s bookmarks and makes good use of the bookmarks as you’re typing in a URL. It takes just a few keystrokes before the bookmarked site you want shows up in a little list under the window where you type in URLs. Tap it and you’re off to the site.