Cool smartphone, non-spam email (and techie fun)

Last week my Orange C600 phone finally did my head in. It kept crashing and the little joystick wouldn’t point downwards. So I decided to replace it.

Writing emails SMS-style with a numeric keypad is hard work. (I think people younger than me have some genetic modification that means they can do it.) So I wanted a phone with a Blackberry-style keyboard. I already had an HP phone with one but it’s too big and heavy to go in my pocket. It’s got GPS on it so it’s great for the car. I wanted a pocketable smart phone, with a keyboard that worked with my server.

I ended up buying a Samsung I600. It’s very cool – much slimmer and thinner than it looks in the pictures. Plus it’s black and shiny in the same way that the monolith in 2001 is black and shiny. It’s got a little scroll wheel on the side which is good for browsing email. The little keyboard means I can write messages much more easily than on my old phone. I’ve had it a week or so and I’m really pleased with it.

So then fun began. I have always synchronised my phone with my server. I have Microsoft Small Business Server 2003, which I set up originally because I was writing some copy for Microsoft about it and wanted to understand it properly. But I never got round to encrypting my email or setting up Blackberry-style push email. So that’s what I did over the weekend. I bought an SSL certificate from Go Daddy and followed these instructions from Microsoft. I had to go through the process a couple of times – there are several ways to screw it up and I had to convert Go Daddy’s certificate into a .cer format and also import it manually into my browser; but basically it all works now.

It’s weird and wonderful to have my phone beep whenever I get a new mail. And comforting to have it secure.

I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I find that a proportion of my email never reaches its intended recipient – it just gets caught in spam filters. Very annoying since, obviously, I’m not spamming people. So my other geek project, last weekend, was to set up an SPF record for my outgoing email. I used to route all my outgoing email through Zen, my ISP. But increasingly I was getting bouncebacks from people saying that the sender was on a Spam blacklist. (There’s a great tool on DNSstuff you can use to check if a domain is listed on a spam blacklist.) So I switched my server back to sending email directly and I added an SPF record to my DNS record to give some measure of sender authentication. I don’t think this is going to solve the problem completely, but it was fun testing it with Google Mail and seeing the header show that my email had been cross checked and had come from an authorised server. There is a cool wizard on Microsoft’s site that will help create an SPF record.

I enjoy tinkering around with technology. It helps me with my work too – keeps my geek credentials up-to-date. My next project is to figure out the whole HDTV home cinema thing and get a cheap system set up.

Technorati Tags: Smartphone, Samsung, I600, SPF, spam, Sender ID

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