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Couple of issues with China Mobile's Internet


roddy

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For any users of China Mobile's GPRS / EDGE services:

Are you able to access email via POP3? I'm sure I've had it working in the past, but I don't use it often. It's now failing ('同步错误') whenever I'm on mobile Internet, but is fine when on wifi. I'm wondering if maybe this is China Mobile being annoying. Other Internet use is fine - Opera, IE, RSS reader, all work fine. I've done everything I can think of to check, next step would be to install another mail program and see if that works, but not sure if I'm that bothered.

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I use SMTP/POP a lot from my Windows Mobile device on the China Mobile network. I don't have any problems. Check to make sure you are using cmnet, not cmwap for the "APN" in your GPRS connection to the Internet. The Internet can work with WAP, but SMTP/POP will not.

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I use China Mobile (MZone) with a Palm Treo 750v running WM6.1.

I don't use any special mail programme, just the one as part of WM.

Receiving of my POP mail works just fine, but I always send through my gmail, since gmail never seems to be blocked here.

(One thing that sucks is, people sometimes reply to my gmail account - which I never actually check since I only use it as my outgoing mail server!)

Also, I agree with the above poster about the settings, that does make a difference.

Good luck!

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For the gmail account issue. Set up forwarding, so all mail to gmail will go to your other email account.

For SMTP/POP, my email service is in the US (Earthlink) and I do not have any problems. You do have to be careful about what your email provider wants to allow sending. My wants secure and to send user ID/password and it goes to a non-obvious port number.

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Thanks folks. I'm connecting to cmnet, but I think there's something odd going on I'm not understanding - I've been trying every possible configuration change I can think of and still not getting anywhere, despite trying different pop3 servers. Going to have to leave it for now - I tend to use Gmail's mobile site anyway, which is generally very good. However it falls down on handling attachments, which I need to do sometimes, so POP3/SMTP is handy.

One thing you could perhaps check for me which may be a clue - if you go settings>connections> 设置我的代理服务器, what do you have as your proxy server and also what protocols do you have listed under advanced?

Edit: I think that might be the issue. If I have a GPRS connection under Internet 设置, there's no option to configure the 代理服务器 and I can't connect to anything. If I have one under 单位设置 or WAP the proxy settings appear - but under advanced POP3 and SMTP aren't listed and there's no option to add them that I can see.

Edited by roddy
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For cmnet, you should not be using a proxy server. Check the box that says you use this connection for the Internet, but do not check the proxy server box. Note that using MMS is a bit of a challenge because it uses a WAP connection to a different site and does go through a proxy server.

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Not in Opera for WM (8.65) - the only network settings available are to enable SSL and TLS.

To be honest at this point I'm not that bothered - if anyone has any ideas I'll try them, but personally I'm putting to down to the fickle gods of GPRS.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Couple of issues

I was originally going to ask about something else, but decided mid-type to leave it until I'd done a bit more work myself. I now know what's happening with these, sticking the info up here on the off chance it's useful for anyone else.

a) There are issues with some GPRS systems and Opera Mobile 8.65, which result in XML parsing errors. As far as the forums go, I've managed to fix it so it fails at the end of the HTML, rather than the middle, so the mobile version of forums pages actually display ok - you get an error message at the bottom, but that's ignorable. A lot of pages suffer from this, some don't. I'm not sure if the actual 'fault' lies with the way the GPRS gateway handles the HTML, or Opera. Pocket IE doesn't suffer the same problems.

B) China Mobile's GPRS / EDGE seems to usually (but amusingly enough for those trying to troubleshoot, not always) strip user agent info from requests. I can't see any good reason for doing this, especially as it prevents sites detecting mobile browsers and serving up appropriate pages. But I have actually had server logs open, and requests I send via China Mobile have no UA info, requests via broadband do.

I'm not sure if these are common issues with GPRS, with China Mobile GPRS, or just China Mobile in Beijing.

Still no joy on POP3, but have forgotten about that for now anyway.

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I'm guessing B) might mean they have a transparent proxy to do aggressive compression on the GPRS / EDGE sessions. E.g., they might be re-compressing images on the fly, gzipping html, etc.

Normally, proxy servers will cache pages indexed by the user-agent so the same page viewed by different client-types will be cached multiple times and thus render as expected. But to save space, proxies can force loading of just one generic page version by either setting a custom user-agent, or in this case by not sending a user-agent at all.

That they don't do this consistently is somehow not surprising. :D

Then again I haven't been able to get my China Unicom GPRS to work at all...

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  • 4 months later...
a) There are issues with some GPRS systems and Opera Mobile 8.65, which result in XML parsing errors. As far as the forums go, I've managed to fix it so it fails at the end of the HTML, rather than the middle, so the mobile version of forums pages actually display ok - you get an error message at the bottom, but that's ignorable. A lot of pages suffer from this, some don't. I'm not sure if the actual 'fault' lies with the way the GPRS gateway handles the HTML, or Opera. Pocket IE doesn't suffer the same problems.

For reference, China Mobile appear to have fixed this now.

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