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A Day in NYC: A Second Brush with Falling Objects, iPhone Email Issues

Henny Penny

Back in June, on assignment in New York City, we just missed being pummeled by some falling terra cotta.  Yesterday, we were in no danger but our location was in the new Bank of America tower at 42nd St. and 6th Avenue.  Prior, we were sitting in the plaza across the street by the HBO building, eating our lunch, and wondering why there were so many security, police and construction guys with walking talkies milling about.  Turns out a piece of glass had fallen off the BOA building 15 minutes before.

iPhone Email Invalidation

While on location yesterday I found that I could no longer send my domain name email from the iPhone.  Checking email on any account worked fine but outgoing jonroemer.com email would sit in the Outbox and generate the following message,

invalid

Sender address?  That’s me, I’m the sender.  How could my address be invalid? This has happened to me once or twice in the past but restarting the phone seemed to correct things.  In my current case it did not, doing a hard reset did not correct it either and trying the Edge network instead of 3G was of no help. When I got home being hooked into my wireless network did not remedy the problem.  Same message,

Cannot Send Mail

The sender address was invalid.

Some digging and googling later, lots of deleting the email account and recreating it, throw in a full restore of the iPhone and I think I solved the problem.  It turns out that this is a common situation but it can have many causes.  My domain name email’s outgoing server is Verizon’s outgoing server for my in office FiOS service.  The problem was with that server.  From what I can tell at some point Apple changed the Server Port from 25 to 587 (during a software update?) or maybe Verizon changed it to keep me on my toes. Whatever the reason, changing this server port in the Outgoing Mail Server window back to 25 has corrected the issue.  If you get the same error message you may want to give this a try.