11 April 2014 rejected by the server p04-smtp.mail.me.com

Same here in UK - impossible!

No. Well, not yet. Bit hard when you've just wasted hours thinking its your iMac playing up. Can send mail from iPhone. Also Mail on icloud.com still working. Seems like its a worldwide Apple server problem.

having seen all the replies here, I can now go to bed without thinking I'm a complete idiot!

Same happening in Canada, but only at home. Send and recieve though the work WiFi.

But nothing works at home, Macs or iPads.

Very frustrating

That's odd. I can't send from my iPad, iPhone, mac Mini, new 2014 Mac Pro or Mac Book Pro. However, my wife's MacBook Pro sitting next to me on the same Apple network can, no problem! So it must be connected to our Apple IDs or servers we are assigned to. She is using a different one, P03-imap.mail.me.com whereas I am on P04-imap.mail.me.com and there is no way to change this I can see.

I found a hack to make it work (for now).

Add this line to your /etc/hosts file:

17.158.10.225 p04-smtp.mail.me.com

That is the IP number of another one of apple's smtp mail servers named p03-smtp....

You can check:

% dig p04-smtp.mail.me.com (see the IP no.)

% dig p03-smtp.mail.met.com

Or possibly preferable: In your Mail.app's account information for iCloud account: Add smtp servers explicitly:

Add the host named p01-smtp.mail.me.com, p-02..., p-03..., to your SMTP Servers list for the iCloud account

This is a comment for Apple really (if anybody monitors these forums):

Why can you not tell your users there is a problem, either by sending an email or by announcing it on your website? I've wasted so much time searching the internet trying to work out what the problem is - it was only when I typed the exact error message into my search engine that I found a number of these discussions, all similar, where people have gradually realised they are having the same problem.

Thanks to the person who has just posted a way around it, but I'm not IT-literate enough to follow your instructions.

I spoke to two people at Apple - both kept insisting that everything was on a green light and there were no reported problems. I told the second one to check out these discussion forums and asked him to look into it and call me back. He did and said that it is in fact a problem, they are working on it, and he had never seen anything like this before. I even asked why they have a green light if it's down. He said normally the light is very accurate and seemed surprised. I can only send if I log into icloud and can't do anything from iphone, ipad, or laptop otherwise. I'm in Virginia and it's been like this all day. Very frustrating!! I hope it's not the Heartbleed or something!!!

Same in Tokyo for past 20 hours.

I re-set icloud several times, still not working.

I have two apple ID.

p01-smtp is working.

p04-smtp is not.

Me too - travel day so didn't work in Atlanta GA, USA or Las Vegas NV or Joshua Tree CA.

And the funny bit is Apple System Status is all 'green' - that's a different status than the one I'm held too....

http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/

Yes, same problem here in Yokohama Japan.

Frustrating that Apple support page say all systems are up an running!

😠

In baltimore 12:12am ET same

Problem persists on 3 of four devices (weird why not my OLD MacBook? But the problem persists on MacBook Pro iMac iPhone). On iPhone, per suggestions, disabled all outgoing severs, added p01 and turned it on. Yet still tries p04 and fails!!

Oops. Didn't push "done" after adding p01 in settings. When did that --it works!!! Success!! Try it

Spent hours on this until I found this forum with its successful

Suggestion. Thank goodness for you all!!

Will check back here to see if anyone learns of system-wide apple fix. My two hours on phone and even two SENIOR apple technicians were unaware of the system-wide problem were stumped and have engineering planning to call me in the morning !

Same here in San Francisco, CA. Been having problems all day long. Almost lost a client because of it. Apple, I know you're not perfect, but all I ask for is communication! At least I can stop troubleshooting since I know its not just me.