iPhone 3.0 SMTP Issue. (Fix Included)

I ran into a rather annoying problem yesterday. I was in San Jose, CA and wanted to forward an email when I encountered this issue. The mail that I just forwarded resided in my Outbox forever and I got this error:

"The user name or password for SMTP: @SMTP.gmail.com is incorrect."

Funny part is my incoming mail continued to work perfect and obviously, the user name and password were correct. We thought it was temporary issue. But the error persisted and my annoyance grew in sync with my curiosity. I tried several combinations - composed an email, forwarded an email, deleted my secondary emails (GMail) on iPhone. Nothing worked and my Outbox kept growing. The only significant change to my GMail settings is that I changed my password last week. I updated the password in Calendar (Google Sync) and GMail on iPhone and was able to recieve emails flawlessly. But I did not send/forward any emails after I changed my password.

After playing with most of the settings I tried the 'default' option. Delete the existing account and create a new one. That did not fix the problem either. With some googling, and by digging into the settings I was able to figure out the issue. Not sure if this issue happened in iPhone 2.0. But, here is the fix for 3.0.

Once you change GMail password, we need to update the password in Settings-> Mail. But there is a hidden SMTP field that needs to be updated too. Else sending mails will not work.

Go to Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Accounts (Choose the GMail account that has this error).

Under 'Outgoing Mail Server' tap SMTP.

Under SMTP, you get to see Primary Server and Other SMTP Servers.

Tap on 'smtp.gmail.com' under Primary Server.

You will see your old password in the settings here (the password will be encoded though). Update this field with your new password and you are all set.

Again, there could be many reasons why this error happened and could depend on the way you configured your GMail account on iPhone or could be a 3.0 specific issue. But this solution fixes the SMTP issue.