voice memo problem: can't send in email

[nusilver]

Hi all. I haven't been able to find info on this anywhere, and it's kinda bothering me since it's affecting both my phone and my girlfriend's.

So we have recordings made with voice memo that we'd like to email each other - but every time we try to send them, we get a "Cannot Send Mail: An error occurred while delivering this message." message.

We're both using iPhone 3Gs (not 3GSs) and both phones have been jailbroken.

help! she's leaving for Australia tomorrow, I won't see her for 10 days, and she has a recording she wants me to hear!

mb

[S2_Mac]

LOL, I love it -- you two have phones that you make recordings with, that you want to email to each other via the phones. A friend of mine from Wellington always covered his outrageous behavior by claiming that folks from Oz were crazier than Kiwis...never believed him until now ;-)

Perhaps the files are too large (exceeding the carrier's upload limit or timing out during upload) -- even though vox recordings are mono, that's still a couple of megabytes per minutes using Apple Lossless. She might want to try syncing the recording back to her computer and then converting it to a really tiny mp3 (say, 48Kbps bit rate, 22.05KHz sample rate), uploading it back to the phone, and try to send it....

[nusilver]

well, i guess i should mention that she's a musician and she's recorded a demo of a song we're planning on recording together - and we're both Californians. Guess it doesn't matter.

Also...the recording is exactly 1:08. No way is it too long.

[S2_Mac]

we're both Californians

So then you're both off the hook ;-) I'm not an iPhone-er, so I have no experience with this; I was just trying to give you an initial troubleshooting step. What apps/plugins are you using? iFile? Cydia's mailto: plugin? Some of the dev chatter is about trouble with certain file types; have you tried zipping the .m4a files?

[nusilver]

i appreciate the fact that you've been the only person to respond, but you're over-thinking things. we're using the voice memo app that's built into OS 3.0, which allows you to send clips directly through your email, just like with photos (and videos on the 3G S).

anyway, i figured ilounge was definitely the place to go...I can't believe nobody else has experienced this. i guess i'll head to apple's website.

[pss3757]

have you ever been able to send voice memos using 3.0 ?? where i am, AT&T has not yet enabled the MMS feature of the phone, thus will not work on my 3G.

if you are running jailbroken 3.0, that may be another story, but i am not the person to ask. you may want to look in the "jailbreak" threads. sorry...

[nusilver]

You don't need mms enabled to send a voice memo in an email.

[jhollington]

Correct. What e-mail provider are you using? There's no reason this shouldn't be working, other than the possibility that something is wrong with your outbound mail at your provider, either in terms of blocked attachments types or attachments sizes (although I agree that 1:08 shouldn't be too long).

I assume you can send normal e-mail messages from your iPhone without any problems, correct?

[nusilver]

I am using yahoo.

A little update - I managed to send two voice memos to her earlier - the first was 33 seconds, the next was approximately 20 seconds - I only sent the second one because the phone told me the first one failed.

in any case, upon digging through the official apple forums, i found people complaining about how this issue has affected their 3Gs but not their 3GSs. I don't know if this is what happens at apple when their leader is on the mend and unable to make key decisions about products, but if you're advertising something as working, it should work. i can understand filesize limits - but a 33 second voice memo is 1.5mb - there's no reason an approximately 3mb file can't be sent through 3G or wifi.

[jhollington]

Actually, yes the voice memos can be relatively large, and there are any number of reasons why a large file transfer can fail, particularly over a slower network.... I don't think it's a 3G or 3GS specific issue so much as it's going to be related to the carrier and the mail server -- you're sending large amounts of data over a high-latency and relatively slow wireless connection.

Obviously, this should be far less of an issue over Wi-Fi than over a cellular network, so if you're having this problem on Wi-Fi as well, then it could still easily be your mail provider. I believe Yahoo is supposed to allow attachments up to 10MB in size, so I don't think it's specifically a size limitation, but there could still be other communication problems. Are you using a pre-configured Yahoo account or have you set up your own SMTP server manually? It might be worth trying the latter -- configuring a different SMTP server or mail account if you have one available and see if that changes things.

I've had no problems sending larger files via e-mail from any of my devices, including an iPod touch 2G, iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, but I'm also not using Yahoo as an e-mail provider -- in my case I use GMail and MobileMe.

[deaconzr]

I was having trouble sending a 1min voice memo for the past couple days as well. I solved the problem by changing my iPhone's default email account to my Google mail instead of my Yahoo mail. It may be a Yahoo mail problem.

[ronipstone]

I had the same problem and the only way to overcome it was to change the default email setting.

I have found that the application will work with googlemail.

So

(1) Get googlemail account.
(2) Make the new account the default setting when sending voice memos (Settings>>>Mail etc>>> Default Account)
(3) Send voice memo
(4) Change back to desired default account.

I do not know why this should be, and other email accounts might work, so if you do not fancy a google mail keep trying email account until you get one that works.

Ron