Home Forums Networks & Cross-Platform Networking Apple Mail - Prefs Issue

Within the last couple of weeks I opened an additional account in my Apple Mail. For some reason I started being unable to "Send" and the problem seemed sometimes in the new account and sometimes in my regular account.

I got on the phone with the ISP tech support and did a bunch of resets (including a custom port number). Every was running fine until the last 24 hours. I did mail yesterday at 12:30 AM but when I got up in the morning, all is awry.

I have been resetting the prefs all day and periodically been able to send from the two accounts. The new account seems to have stayed okay after it asked if I wanted the password kept in my keychain, and I affirmed.

However, Mail does not seem to want to keep Preference settings in my main account.

Some of the curious behaviours have been:

- The custom port is selected but Mail changes that port number to another, that has never been the selection. There are three (25, 465, 587) and the ISP prefers to use 25

- I have restored the mail plist using Time Machine and that worked a couple of times. Strangely though, I could only use any TM copy once. I had to keep going back to older and older TM copies.

- Once, when I went back to a previously used TM plist, I opened Mail to find my Inbox and Sent both empty.

- I have tried removing the plist and restarting in the hope of a plist rebuild but nada. Mail opened with the dialogue box for starting a new account.

I'm unable to talk to anyone at the ISP Tech Support as their phone message went from waiting times over four hours to "don't bother waiting".

When I try to send I get a dialogue box that says:

"Cannot send using the server (the name it uses is the correct ISP server)
The connect to the server (correct server name) on port 25 timed out.
Select a different server from the list below (the 'list' is the one name of the correct server)"


Any thoughts would be appreciated. Hitting the sack now, up in a few hours.

ryck

Hi Ryck,

....it's not you.

MobileMe status

Apple's Mail servers have been broken for several hours now.....no access from mobile devices (iPhone), standalone email clients (Mail.app), or web-based (me.com/mail).

They haven't updated their status page now for nearly five hours, so I can only hope that they are concentrating all their efforts on fixing the issue.

I'm not certain that we're talking the same issue, but a while back I was seeing the same dialog box you've reported, and I eventually figured out that Mail was trying to send from one account using the "Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)" of another.

I don't remember it always having been this way, but each of my Mail accounts has a uniquely recognizable SMTP Server, and I may actually have had to cobble one up for the account that was causing the problem.

Thanks M, but I don't think that would be me either. My ISP is the local cable company and I'm not Mobile with anything.

Just in case, I did another "send" test this morning but got the same dialogue window.

ryck

Interesting thought.....given things seem coincident with establishing a new account.

I'm back on hold this morning (no giant wait time caution) and hoping I connect with someone who knows Macs but, meanwhile I'll check all the pref settings in the new account. It seems to me that most should be the same, except account name and password et cetera, because I just have the one server name.

The ISP uses the same name in all cities except for a a two letter indication of what city the customer is in.

I'll check my visitor account while at it.

ryck

Thanks both of you. We seem to have reached Nivana.

I looked in the other accounts, being very careful only to read setting and not to change anything, and when I returned to my main account....voila.....the message that had been refusing to depart....went.

And so I sit here scratching my head but at least communicating.

Thanks again.

ryck

> And so I sit here scratching my head but at least communicating.