How Apple’s iOS 4’s forwarding can send you down the wrong path!
It’s been discussed a lot lately (especially in relationship to Novell’s upcoming Mobility Server), how Apple devices treat email forwarded “as attachment”. For the record, this is not a GroupWise issue. Any email system that has the ability to forward as attachment suffers this problem. In iOS 3.x, the attachment merely shows as “mime-attachment” and cannot be opened. So, we GroupWise users have become accustomed to flipping over to the fabulous GW Mail to view these messages.
To Apple’s credit, with iOS 4 they attempted to make this better. However, most of us who are using iOS 4 think it’s worse! Apple has done something in the Mail app itself to render this information that is in the forwarded email. Unfortunately, they neglected to add those silly tags like WHO the original message was from, and that the message actually CONTAINS a forwarded email. Take this little exchange.
Helga and Jamie are working on deploying the new Novell Mobility Server for a customer. Jamie sends the following email to Helga:
- -- Message from Jamie to Helga--
Now, Helga’s a smart cookie, and she realizes that you can’t “upgrade” a 32 bit SLES to 64 bit SLES, so she passes the information on to Danita.
- -- Helga forwards Jamie's message on to Danita --
Alas, Danita is out of the office, and receives Helga’s message on her iPhone running iOS4.
- -- What Danita sees on her iPhone --
Poor Helga. Danita thought she was a lot smarter than that! Maybe Jamie will get the bonus this year that Danita had planned for Helga!
So just a heads up – if you receive an email that really makes no sense to you, give it a closer look!
Now, of course, if everyone in this exchange had a signature at the bottom of the message, it would be a bit more obvious. That said, I’d prefer the handling in iOS 3.x myself!
Happy GroupWising.
Danita
I can’t remember the last time I did *not* see “sent from my iphone” as the signature, so this would be less of an issue in my workplace. Still, there is much Apple could improve upon here.
PS – Good, funny example emails there. In-place upgrade SLES 32-bit to 64-bit, LOL! As if any vendor would actually try to one-up the situation with Windows.
Remember though that these messages weren’t composed on an iPhone. Merely read on the iPhone. Both messages were composed with the GroupWise client, without signatures. I know that I have my sig set to prompt and I don’t add it to internal email.
Since the advent of iOS4 I’ve received many messages that made no sense til I viewed them in GroupWise and realized they were messages forwarded as attachments