Server Cannot Be Contacted on Port 143

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Level 1

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Server Cannot Be Contacted on Port 143

I am trying to send a message from Mail on the same computer as the OS X Server. How can it not contact itself? The message I get is:

"Unable to Connect - There may be a problem with the mail server or network. Check the settings for the account 'wbe-pii IMAP Server' or try again. The server error encountered was: The server 'mail.wbe-pii.com' cannot be contacted on port 143."

Thanks for any help.

Intel iMac, Intel Mac Mini, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Jul 6, 2009 6:47 AM

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Answer 1

Camelot

Level 9

54,339 points

Jul 6, 2009 8:09 AM in response to RandySK

Well, the obvious question is what does 'mail.wbe-pli.com' translate to on the machine?

Does it translate to your public IP address, in which case your traffic has to go out through your router and come back in? In addition to not being ideal, that's also not supported by a number of different routers (they can't handle NAT traffic coming back in from the private network).

In most cases the solution is to setup internal DNS so that your hostname maps to the internal address of your server, not the external one.

In this case, though, you could also configure Mail.app to use 'localhost' for the mail server, rather than 'mail.wbe-pli.com'. That will enable it to talk to the server running on the local system.

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