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Suddenly on 31 August, on opening Mail, the error message “Cannot get mail; The connection to the server failed” is displayed. This affects all my devices: Macbook, iPhone and iPad.
Deleted accounts and reinstalled with same outcome. Has Apple substantially raised the bar on minimum system requirements for iCloud given on the page below without telling anyone?
MacBook
Hello iSerendipity,
Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.
We understand that you were getting a "Connection to the server failed." when opening Mail across all of your devices. You tried deleting accounts and reinstalled them with no change. To answer your specific question regarding the article on iCloud system requirements, those requirements have not changed since the last update of that article on February 22, 2021.
You can use this link: Apple System Status to check the current status of the various Apple services. Additionally, you will want to check the status of your other system connectivity.
Best regards.
iSerendipity,
Thank you for getting back to us. Glad to hear that you are able to connect again. If there is an issue with the Apple systems or services, the Apple System Status link is the place to check. But it only shows the current status, not a historical status. If the issue was with your internet provider or some other network or system, we have no way to check that.
Regards.
Thank you for the reassurance that the minimum system requirements for iCloud have not changed. Through a process of testing all other possibilities for failing to access iCloud, the only other possibility was a problem with the server. That seems to have been borne out by ‘normal service’ being resumed by 18:00 BST on 1 September. 48 hours is a long time for a server to be down. Can you confirm that indeed was the cause of the problem that many others in the Community have also been reporting?
I am aware of the basics. I have been using Mail since it was released to an unbelieving world as .Mac over 19 years ago and iCloud since it was first established. I did check the obvious. The first thing was to check my other devices and then that my wife’s Mail was working on her iPad running iOS 14.4.1, which it was. Safari was also running fine, which indicated there was no problem with the network or with the ISP. I also checked iCloud status regularly at the same link you provided and all services were operating normally. Curiously, my Mail was operating on iCloud.com but not through the Mail client.
That suggested that the fault was with the IMAP/SMTP server routing and it is not inconceivable that there are different servers dealing with legacy .Mac accounts to those dealing with more recent versions. I therefore offer to you the hypothesis that this is indeed the case and that Apple’s system status only indicates current and not legacy services. Would anyone like to share their thoughts on this?
My iCloud is not working right right now please help me out
Connection to iCloud server failed
