Using iPhone with Lotus Notes email

So you're probably wondering what these things have in common. Okay, 2 are easy. iPhone and Yahoo work together for email pretty much out of the box. Well, at least they did for me.

My problem was trying to get my iPhone to work with the corporate Lotus Notes email. My employer wisely chose to not allow POP3 or IMAP access to Lotus Notes. They do offer an iNotes web interface. However, the Safari Browser on the iPhone does not support Java applets. So, while that interface works, it is pretty clunky.

Well, I was able to get my email on the iphone by simply forwarding my Lotus Notes email to my new Yahoo account. This actually forwarded the email while retaining the addresses of the original sender and other recipients. (I couldn't get this capability through gmail.)

The downside here was if I replied, it would look like it came from my Yahoo account. Which, in fact, it did.

So, I took the plunge, after doing some reading, and signed up for Yahoo Plus. This provided the capability to allow me to send emails as if from my corporate account after verifying access to the corporate email account. (gmail does provide this capability for free.)

But still no joy using the default IMAP mail setup for Yahoo standard on the iPhone.

So, I disabled that account on the iPhone and proceeded to set up access to Yahoo as a POP3 account. This option comes with the Yahoo Plus upgrade. However, I couldn't use the Yahoo directions for this.

The server addresses were correct. However incoming needs SSL turned on in the advanced email settings. For Outgoing SSL had to be off. The address on the account should be set to the corporate email address you verified earlier.

Please don't ask for the server addresses. I'm sure they are out there on the web elsewhere.

So, now I can get my corporate Lotus Notes email on my iPhone and reply to it as if I'm sitting at my desk.

Next up, Calendar and Corporate Directory as contacts.