iCloud mail - POP client password issue?

I'm having the same issue. This just started today. On my iPad and iPod I have my @mac.com mail downloaded via POP, so I can have a little more control (on my Mac is IMAP/iCloud).

Both devices are not receiving mail and state that the username or password is incorrect, despite nothing being changed. I have tried different potential solutions but nothing has worked.

I suspect Apple has done something with iCloud and POP. I don't want my iDevices to be use mail with iCloud, so I hope Apple informs us here what is happening and/or why.

Mail.app on my Mac is also reporting that the iCloud POP password is incorrect. It's giving me the following error message: "Trying to log in to this iCloud POP account failed. Verify that the username and password are correct." The iCloud SMTP server works just fine, by the way. Receiving iCloud mail over IMAP (the way I have set it up on my iPhone) is working just fine, strangely. What the heck is going on here? This is freaking me out. This started happening yesterday evening for me as well. This is unacceptable, if you ask me.

iCloud does not provide POP access. MobileMe did, but only if you specifically asked them to set it up - IMAP was the default. iCloud is IMAP only and therefore access using POP will fail.

If people are saying they were previously able to access iCloud mail using POP I can't explain that; Apple are quite clear that iCloud does not support POP - see the bottom of this page.

You might not be able to explain why or how, like you said, but I did indeed have Mail.app and iCloud working just fine over POP until yesterday. Weird, if it wasn't supported from the get go. I moved my mail to iCloud the day it became available without any problems for POP.

Why did Apple decide to drop POP support for iCloud, though? Sure, we live in the cloud now and as such POP doesn't really fit in with the way we are supposed to access said cloud. I can see that. But come on! Some people actually like to have some control over their own mail. I think it's seriously flawed that Apple only supports IMAP now.

I can only guess that for people who had MobileMe with POP, this was maintained for a time after the migration process. However, whatever the reasoning or the history I'm afraid the fact is that iCloud is IMAP.

So does this mean we'll [1] have to move all our messages back to the iCloud server (nearly 4GB for me) to prevent losing any data, [2] only then delete our iCloud POP account from Mail.app, and [3] then add the iCloud account again, only this time with IMAP access instead of POP? That's seriously flawed now, isn't it? And yet I thought Apple was all for ease of use. Maybe it's time to say iCloud goodbye and rely on Google for the cloud. I bloody hate IMAP.

You can move the messages you have already downloaded to your Mac to a new mailbox located under 'On My Mac' and then they will be safe when you remove the account and set it up again.

Mark Gibson7 wrote:

The bit about "On My Mac" assumes you use Apple's Mail client.

Yes: I don't have experience of anything else.

Same here. Just got done talking to a very knowledgable Apple support person. iCloud was not intended to support POP though the servers are still on an talking.

Support person said that it is understood that POP is important for many people as some devices may require that.

My belief is that it was disabled over the weekend, by plan. It may stay disabled (probably) but hope is not lost.

Contact Apple support and vote for your POP!

It was working fine a little while ago. Again, I hadn't changed anything on my iPad/iPod and then sudenly there wasa few messages downloaded via POP. However, doing a test a few minutes ago it was back to username/password errors under POP.

I would like to send something to Apple, but under the iCloud support, they only have "Express Lane" and when I typed in my hardware number the Symptoms field was there but I was unable (or unallowed) to type my issue in.

If anyone from Apple is reading these threads – please continue POP under iCloud.

I love iCloud for it's immediate syncing with calandar, notes, reminders, etc, but I like reciveing mail with my Mac as my primary and my iDevices as "copies" with which I can do whatever I want. To have all mail folders on my Mac mirrored on my iDevices would be inconvenient, and I've already had an issue of iCloud deleting notes on my mac (when I deleted the "On my iPod" notes actually on my iPod...and this wasn't an error as I checked and double checked that I wasn't deleting the "On My iCloud" notes.

I hope this is just an intermittent problem, since it was working again this morning. Did anyone else have it working again today?

I should imagine that you would get a "cannot connect to server" error had Apple intentionally taken POP service offline. I also have this problem, which is annoying because I can read my email on my iPhone, I can read it from the web, but while I can SEND email from any device, I can't login to the POP server to download email into Entourage.

My most recent receipt of email is 11/7/2011 at 2:30pm.

As a side note, I agree with other comments that support for these services is poor to nil.

As from today, I can not use my dotmac account any longer as pop... Which is extremely annoying. Who decided that pop was a lousy way of working better to be stopped? Can we as apple users pleeeeeese choose whether we want pop or imap? I do NOT want imap... I want my mails on my computer where I can decide what to do with them. I do not believe in mails or whatever on a cloud.

I also had incredible hard times to try to get on the message boards today.

I spoke with an apple rep this afternoon on the phone for over an hour, he was going to call me back, did of course not call me back, in the end, my pop is still not working... There are also issues with username and passwords...

There is no real clear language about the difference between me and mac com, I thought we were going to be able to keep both of them next to each other as practically the same account...

When I checked my iphone half an hour ago, suddenly my mac account was gone, replaced with icloud, and all my mac mails were gone too. It ***** big time that some hobo thinks that pop is no longer handy and just takes it out. I am livid...

I want my pop back... and I find the thing going on between icloud and mobile me extremely confusing and not at all userfriendly and without glitches... I tried the whole day to change a primary email addy, which I never had to do before, it would not let me, I am so peeved right now... What is going on on the pop/imap front and why is there no information available????