Rogers in Canada no longer supports Mac desktop Mail app
I thought i had just posted all of this a few minutes ago but it appears to have vanished.
So here it is again.
I'm going through some Rogers induced **** at the moment.
It's hard to explain and I don't fully understand it myself but the short story is Rogers no longer supports Sending or Receiving emails using the Apple Mail app on desktop computers.
I'll try to explain.
Rogers uses a different password authentication system for its web-based email portal.
Whatever password and credentials you set up on the web site will work for the web-based email portal as well the Mail app on iPhones and iPads.
But apps like Mail on Apple's desktop computers need what is called an app-generated password, and Rogers stopped supporting that type of password back in 3-23.
My Mac Mail app was working fine until recently when I started noticing these little icons indicating a connection issue.
But my emails were being sent and received w/o issue.
Then last week I found out that some of my emails were not arriving at their destinations.
So I started troubleshooting and researching the issue on my end.
At some point I tried changing my password using the app, and the app has been logged out ever since.
It was only after being in a Chat Session with a Rogers rep that he told me what was really going on.
He gave me a link to a Rogers Forum discussion that details the whole mess that I'll include at the end of this post.
The suggested workarounds are:
1. To stop using the Mail app and to use Rogers' web portal instead.
2. Use Gmail instead.
3. DL the MS Outlook Mac app and use it instead.
All 3 of these 'solutions' create various untenable problems that are too complicated to go into here.
But I'll give you a little taste.
1. On my Mac, I have several Local Folders where I've filed away various emails (since 2008) according to various criteria.
When using Rogers' web portal, their system is such that only my Inbox and Sent folders are synced with the Inbox and Sent folders in my Mail app.
So the emails that I've moved to all of these subfolders are not present on the web portal.
If I set up the same folder structure on the web portal, there is no way to import my old existing emails into those folders whether i'm trying to import mbox files or individual .eml files.
There's just no way to do it.
So if I decide to use strategy #1. I'll have just live with using the old Local Folders in my Mail app while I receive and send any new emails using the web portal.
And then going forward, I'll have to file new emails in my newly created web portal folders as needed.
This is REALLY impractical and kludgy.
2. Gmail, after being set up to read my Rogers account data, only allows me to see 3 months of received email even though the web portal shows emails from as old as 2008, emails that I still need to be able to access from time to time.
Now I could just use the web portal to see these emails, but there are other issues with Gmail as well, namely that I can not import the messages from my Mac Mail's Local Folders.
So, #1 is the better option between these two.
Also, since Rogers doesn't allow email forwarding to another account, I'd have to start using my Gmail email address after telling 100s of people about it first.
3. Outlook for Mac seems to have a reduced feature set compared to their Windows version.
But I can still use my Rogers email address with it.
It too will only show a few months of emails of the 16 years of emails that are stored on the Rogers portal server so I'll still have to consult the Apple Mail app to look at emails older than this.
But there is a way, a convoluted and very time consuming way, that I *can* import my old Local Folders' emails into Outlook.
Outlook can import .eml files (individual email files) directly but can not import mbox (Mailbox) files.
So I have to batch save each separate email from Mac Mail's Local Folders as .eml files into a folder on my desktop, and then I have to drag them en masse into one of the correspondingly named folders I've set up in Outlook.
I've just successfully transferred one of my mailboxes (with 2210 messages in it) and it took about 20 minutes.
I have about 20 more folders like this that need to be transferred.
This is really unconscionable on Rogers' part.
They're really telling Apple desktop users to just **** off.
But they're kind of blaming it on Apple, telling me that the industry is moving away from app-generated passwords in general and that Apple has to catch up.
I suppose that Apple could fix this too with a future update.
This is a MAJOR inconvenience for me and I have no idea how I'll be moving forward.
There are bound to be several mis-communications because of this and probably some lost money too.
So far it's just lost time and frustration.
GEEZ!!!!!!!
