Cingular Settings Are Moving Targets

A month or 2, Doug's Cingular phone stopped getting proper DNS settings, so his Java applications which used hostnames to make HTTP connections just broke mysteriously. We poked a hard-coded DNS server in there, and all was well again.

Yesterday, I noted that my Groovr emails silently stopped getting delivered. Further testing today showed that no outgoing email was working, so I went through the normal dance of digging up the configurations from the Cingular Support site. I found it now recommends setting the outgoing server to cwmx.com, and not cwmx.net. I experienced these same kinds of shifts with the SMS-to-email gateways a while ago.

I'm glad that I've learned where to find these answers and don't need to call up tech support every few months when they change things on me.

Update (2007-02-06): cwmx.com has been broken all morning now. The phone just said "Email failed." -- it doesn't really give much clue. I just tested again, though, and the message finally went through. I wish there was somewhere to track these known outages. I really don't feel like contacting a help desk that probably has no idea either.