Mail - Send & Receive Problems

The fix is to move away from Apple altogether. Either that or get used to total outages, at least monthly if not more often. Sometimes it persists for several days. And what do you get for that? Another bill. That's pretty much it. Not even an update on the website, which would be the very least they could do. The truth is not forthcoming.

We don't use .mac account but have had the same problem.

I support about 25 users who all recently started using Apple Mail so we could leverage our iCal server. Everything had been running fine until three weeks ago. Then one day, we had some DNS issues (I’m really tired of that excuse) and for some unknown reason two user’s Mail programs could no longer send email but could receive it just fine. I chalked it up to the DNS issue and a corrupt setting somewhere and told them to use Thunderbird for a while and moved on to bigger fish.

We suffered the same DNS issues over the past couple of days and low and behold 5 new users suffered the same effects of being able to receive email but not send. Some of you are probably already saying “Duh, did you check…. ” but in my defense I didn’t even think of that since I was overwhelmed with DNS at the time. This morning I started looking through the forums and found that there were a whole lot of folks suffering the same problem and how it just appeared out of nowhere after working perfectly fine.

Cut to the chase, here’s the solution: You’re outgoing email server setting have been changed. Seriously, that’s it. Even thought they were correct, some software bug has decided to set them to default. I’ve seen it happen to nine 7 separate machines at this point. All were running 10.5.2 and the Mail 3.2. So I overlooked what even a newbie should know. Check those server settings closely even if you know you set them correct in the beginning.

Here’s the cause (in theory). If Mail can’t find the outgoing server (ie can’t resolve DNS) there is a very good possibility that it will reset the settings back to non ssl and Authentication to none in advanced outgoing email settings.

Hope this has helped.

Since upgrading to 10.5.3 the pop and IMAP accounts won't send messages through their respective SMTP servers that worked under 10.4.11. I had to switch the accounts over to another email program which is not the right answer. I have deleted the SMTP accounts and reentered them, no change. Any help would be greatly appreciated as my opinion of TB2 is not the best.

I have had sent problems with mail on exchange accounts until today when i fixed it strangly
I removed the password setting for the outgoing email server. Selcted "none" on the password pane.
I also removed the accouint and reinstalled it againd with this setting.
Everything works fine now.