WP7 and IMAP emails

In a couple of weeks I'll be away from work to some training.  I've not been to any training in several years, and certainly not since getting my Windows Phone, now on version 7.5.  We use IMAP for our email, which is on  Unix box.  Anyway, can I access my work email account via my WP7 phone, using IMAP?

And for that matter, how to I get rid of it once I'm back from training?

Did you try Bing/Google? Took all of 10 seconds to find this  :

http://www.hosting.com/support/email/set-up-imap-email-on-windows-phone-7

To remove it afterwards, go to settings -> Email And Accounts. Press and hold on the account to get the context menu, which has a delete option.

Herbie

A word of warning: if your email server requires SSL, expect problems.

I had my fair share thanks to self-signed certificates (Exchange Server and an IMAP server of unknown pedigree), and for other unexplained certificate problems (a Lotus Domino, with a certificate that appears to be valid and trusted all the way up).

Needless to say, an iPhone will just ask you (once!) if you want to accept the certificate, install it and just work. With a WP7 you have to get hold of the actual certificate, email it to the device, install it from the attachment, reboot the phone.

And since self-signed certificates expire every year, you never run out of fun...

12 minutes ago, blowdart wrote

*snip*

They don't have to expire every year you know. You just need to create them right

I don't have troubles believing that. But since that's the default for Exchange Server, both for creation and renewal, that's the setup I invariably find. Hence the irritation.

The excellent reasons why a company should stop trusting its own certificates every 12 months by default are way out of my depth...

@blowdart: It's still a rip-off given that the reason they charge is because they're a trusted root. And I really don't trust them to keep their private key safe.

Hell the ones that don't hand out Microsoft signed keys (Verisign), get trivially hacked (Diginotar, Comodo twice), or are simply handing out their private keys in devices to anyone who can pay the bill, and praying to God that  hope nobody will open it up to have a look (Trustwave).

And that's even before we get into the fact that a fair few of them are government owned companies (thankfully governments never hack into other people's computers, so this is obviously just paranoia on my part :/ )

2 hours ago, blowdart wrote

*snip*

Of course considering that SSL Certs are like $20 these days using a self signed one is a silly decision. Especially as that will also get used for S/SMTP so inbound emails will see it, and the sending system may decided not to send as it's not a valid trusted cert. (assuming everything is on the same host).

I could never find anything that cheap, but that's beside the point. If companies are allowed to use a DIY certificate, it doesn't make sense to force them to trust yet another DIY certificate every year.

And it makes even less sense to make you send a certificate to a device. Not exactly material for a "Smoked by Windows Phone" challenge.

Yes, with the due exceptions (IIRC the CA role requires an Enterprise server, and makecert is better known to developers than IT). All of this, including OpenSSL, requires an IT dept that know their stuff, and when a company is pinching pennies enough not to buy a certificate that's certainly not a given.

If you want a sense of what the state of the art is in the wild, just bing "renew exchange certificate". Just don't blame me if your hairline recedes by an inch.

Again, I'm not saying you cannot make this work, I'm just saying that the defaults make things worse than they should be, for no obvious reason I can see. And make WP7 an unwelcome choice for many of my customers.

3 days ago, Blue Ink wrote

A word of warning: if your email server requires SSL, expect problems.

I had my fair share thanks to self-signed certificates (Exchange Server and an IMAP server of unknown pedigree), and for other unexplained certificate problems (a Lotus Domino, with a certificate that appears to be valid and trusted all the way up).

Needless to say, an iPhone will just ask you (once!) if you want to accept the certificate, install it and just work. With a WP7 you have to get hold of the actual certificate, email it to the device, install it from the attachment, reboot the phone.

And since self-signed certificates expire every year, you never run out of fun...

Crap.  My company's email server does require SSL.  Well, I'd better find out where to get the cert.

Thanks.

4 days ago, Dr Herbie wrote

Did you try Bing/Google? Took all of 10 seconds to find this  :

http://www.hosting.com/support/email/set-up-imap-email-on-windows-phone-7

To remove it afterwards, go to settings -> Email And Accounts. Press and hold on the account to get the context menu, which has a delete option.

Herbie

WOW, that worked like a charm.  Thanks!