Stall The Ball

While not surprised that the average salesperson who sells blackberries isn’t going to be up to speed on the intricacies of messaging systems, you would think the mobile operator staff that set up the account would have a clue.

That certainly wasn’t the case for one client I was helping. Until I arrived at the scene the client had been using a domain email address using eircom mail servers. Several months ago he had purchased a blackberry rung the mobile operator and asked that this wonderful new product be setup.

Before we go any further lets make an ASCII map of the situation.

email -TO- Internet -TO- eircom mail server -FETCH- POP3 client

All well and good. Email client connects to the eircom mail server, downloads mail from server and deletes it.

Follow up:

Now we have a new situation. We need the mails to get to the blackberry and to the POP3 client. Fortunately the mobile operator has a nice system whereby any mail sent to firstname.lastname@theirblackberry.mailservers.com gets magically sent to the blackberry.

There are a few different ways of handling this but in this instance possibly the worst way possible was used.

The techie on the other end of the phone decided that this would be best done by having the blackberry email account connect to the eircom mail server and download a copy of the mails and hold them on the blackberry mail account every 15 minutes. But there was a snag. If the POP3 client connected and downloaded the mails before the blackberry account got them then not all mails would make it to the blackberry.

Time for another map.

email -TO- Internet -TO- eircom mail server -FETCH- POP3 client
...........................................^-FETCH- blackberry server -TO- blackberry

So our intrepid techie decide the way to get around this was to have the client reconfigure their POP3 client to leave the mails on the eircom mail server and the blackberry mail server set to only download a copy of new mails.

You can see where this is going, periodically the eircom mail server would fill up and the client would have to manually go into the mail server via a web interface and delete the accumulated mails once his customers started complaining that all mails were being bounced with a mailbox full error message. Obviously this was nuts,

Then the real fun began. Some months later I was called in to install and configure a Small Business Server that was going to handle remote access, emails, file & print and emails. For a variety of reasons including an unreliable internet connection, the client did not want to have the SBS Exchange server use SMTP to collect mails.

Instead we were forced to use the built in POP connector in SBS Exchange to fetch mails from the eircom account. But there is a catch. SBS POP connector cannot be configured to leave emails on the mail server if fetches from. Every time it connects it downloads the mails and deletes them. To make matters worse the client wanted his mails in a timely fashion so the connector was set to 15 minute refreshes.

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