My latest issue with them resulted in more than a week of technical issues and wasted time. It was only resolved when I moved my domain to a different company. I was further irritated when they billed me for the domain, that had been transferred to another company a month earlier, and forced me to fill in a form and fax it across the continent to be reimbursed.

A word of advice for 1&1 customers trying to setup or change GLUE (nameserver IPs) for their domain. After making changes to your subdomains ns1 and ns2.yourdomain.com, you must go into the settings for yourdomain.com and click “update” to start the update process. Otherwise nothing will happen and your GLUE will not be updated, and sometimes even this doesn’t work. Best of luck.

This is an update for people trying to use MMS / picture messages on their Telus iPhone. If it still isn’t working you’re not alone. After nearly three months we are without a solution, and worse Big T isn’t even sure of the problem yet.

I posted this information on Howard Forums a week ago:

-The issue has a KIT (known issue ticket) with hundreds of customers attached, this is likely only a very small fraction of those affected.
-Only [some] CDMA –> HSPA accounts are affected, and only iPhones. New accounts appear to be fine.
-Telus has known about the problem since November 20, and Operations has been working with it since.
-Up and ups at Telus have been alerted about the issue and its a ‘priority’.
-They couldn’t figure out what’s wrong, so they had to contact a third-party. Sounds like its Openwave since they control MMS gateway.

And the biggest news is that the KIT promised more information this week. So hopefully tomorrow or early next week we should at least know what the problem is, and hopefully see a fix.

But more than a week has passed and no update is available. I am extremely irritated by how closed Telus has been on this issue. I’ve spoken to more than a dozen reps that, while friendly, have been given absolutely no concrete information about the problem. I want to know what the problem is yesterday and I want a solution now.

Look. I’m not one to complain about paying for things. I understand that nothing is free, and someone is paying for services I use even if they don’t cost me anything. But this is 2010 and TV listings are everywhere. I can go to canada.com and get listings for free, or stop at the gas station and grab a TV Guide for free (this is same company that’s making us pay for EPG). Forcing us to fork over $19.95 USD just so we can use the listings in EyeTV is absolutely ridiculous. Its not a huge expense, but the irritation of the whole process just puts me off.

Making the situation worse is that most Canadian cable providers encrypt their digital channels. So even with the listings I can still only watch and record in standard definition. The experience is just dismal in comparison to what’s available in the US (for almost nothing or nothing at all). I won’t be purchasing a subscription. Best wishes for those of you who decide to get one.

If anyone is considering creating Canadian EPG alternative, please contact me and I will provide help and server resources.

I finally got an iPhone and I’m loving it so far. Everything is working swell, except for MMS (picture messaging) with other Telus clients. Its a quirky situation:

• I can’t send MMS to other Telus clients
• I can receive MMS from other Telus clients
• I can send an receive from non-Telus clients (Rogers, Fido, Bell)

I don’t know what’s going on at Telus. They have been very friendly and understanding on the phone, but the data department seems a little brain dead on the issue. Its a “known issue”, but it hasn’t been resolved. They also closed all the tickets related to the problem without a fix. The rep I spoke with today said I should “check from time to time”. That’s not really an acceptable solution, but I have received a credit for %50 off last month and the promise of another if the issue isn’t resolved.

So no progress yet, and my only suggestion would be to email pictures instead at this point. Are you having the same problem?

Also I’ve attached the latest Telus Carrier Update file (5.1) for others who are on the troubleshooting journey….

I have four email accounts that I want pushed to my iPhone. 1 Gmail, 2 Google Apps, and 1 external account. Since you can only use 1 Exchange account (Google Sync) on your iPhone I had to come up with a crafty solution.

You could forward all mail to one MobileMe / Yahoo / Exchange / Google Sync account. The problem with that setup is that when you reply to emails they will all be sent from your push enabled account, and not necessarily the one they were sent to.

Instead, I setup all of my email accounts using IMAP and set the fetch interval to 1 hour. This way I can open emails on the right account and reply normally. I’m still not getting push, so I also went into the online settings for my email accounts and setup forwarding to a single Google Sync address (eg iphone@mydomain.com). Now I have the four normal email accounts and one push (iPhone Pushmail) that receives all mail from the others instantly.

Another problem. Now I receive immediate notifications of new mail, but once I open up Mail it fetches from the IMAP accounts, and now I have duplicate new emails. Gross. To solve this problem I logged into to my iphone@yourdomain.com Google Apps (Google Sync enabled) account, and setup a filter that makes all messages “skip the inbox” and applies a label “iPhone” to them.

Then I went in to my Mail settings on my phone and enabled push for the new “iPhone” folder on my iphone@youdomain.com account.

The result: when new mail is received, I get an instant notification. The counter on Mail doesn’t increase, but there is a sound and the phone vibrates just the same. From this point I can open Mail and new messages are quickly fetched from the IMAP accounts.

This solution is far from elegant and I hope if you find something better you’ll share it with me. Hopefully Apple can work with more email providers to make push support a little more common.

Something in has changed in Snow Leopard that causes problems on some Gmail and Google Apps accounts. I’m not completely sure whats going on behind the scenes, but a problem has arisen where Gmail complains the “Account exceeded bandwidth limits.” This means that too much data has travelled between Mail.app on your Mac and Gmail, and Google automatically cuts your account off to maintain service for other users.

If you’ve already been blocked, don’t worry, you can still get your mail online. The block should be removed within a day. I also changed this setting that seems to have prevented me from getting blocked again. In the menubar, click Mail > Preferences > Accounts > select your account > Advanced and change the “Keep copies of messages for offline viewing” to “All messages, but omit attachments”.

Select "All messages, but omit attachments"

Please tell me if this solution works for you guys. I hope that either or Apple or Google comment on this issues because it does seem to be effecting a number of people.