IPhone now supports encrypted Yahoo Mail (iOS 4.2.1) with push!

Question

I was having problems sending email so I took the trouble shooting steps of removing my Yahoo account from the phone and re-adding it (rebooting the phone in between just to be sure).
After doing so I noticed that the iPhone is now connecting to port TCP port 993 to retrieve mail for Yahoo and TCP port 465 to send mail via Yahoo. These are the ports used to receive and send mail using SSL/TLS respectively. See http://www.auditmypc.com/port/tcp-port-465.asp and http://www.auditmypc.com/port/tcp-port-993.asp
In iOS 4.1 and earlier, the iPhone was using ports 143 to retrieve email and 587 to send. These are the ports used when receiving and sending non-encrypted email. See http://www.auditmypc.com/port/tcp-port-143.asp and http://www.auditmypc.com/port/tcp-port-587.asp
There are ways of manually adding a Yahoo Mail account to the phone that sends and receives encrypted mail by going through the other mail settings and entering the servers names by hand, but push mail notifications wouldn't work with that.
So what this all means, assuming this isn't a fluke, is that as of iOS 4.2.1, the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch now support sending and receiving of encrypted mail while still supporting push! That's big news.
Message was edited by: Morac

Answer 1

I've found sending to be hit or miss. It usually works, but frequently fails for reasons I can't figure out. When it fails, sometimes killing the mail app or rebooting the phone will get sending to work. Other times sending email with a different mail provider (MobileMe for example) gets it to work. Other times I have to turn off "Mail" for the Yahoo account and turn it back on.
I will say that sending email usually works, but I've had 3 instances where it simply stopped working since upgrading to iOS 4.2.1. I don't know if this is a bug with iOS or with Yahoo's servers. I do know that when the server connection fails, that the phone is trying multiple times to reach apple.smtp.mail.yahoo.com on TCP ports 587, 465 or 25. I can telnet to that address on any of those ports while this problem is occurring so it seems likely it's an iOS issue.