Why is "incoming Mail Server" grayed out?

I am having the same problem, only on my iMac running Yosemite. For example, the computer received it's last email at 12:01am this morning but my iPhone continued to receive emails on the same account until now (7:20). I can log directly onto the Verizon account from the iMac and look at the email traffic as well. Things seemed to work fine when the incoming server was "incoming.verizon.net" without the "yahoo" piece, but somehow the server settings changed and I can't gain access to them either...

I had the same issue with my verizon account. Not sure why it happened, but I had to create a new verizon account with the correct settings and unchecked the "enable this account" from the old account. (Deleting the old account will delete all previous emails, including those you've sent or had in the draft box, which I wasn't ready to do.)

The reply you posted was dead on. You nailed it! Disabling the "Auto Detect" box, saving the changes, and restarting it solved the problem. All the emails I could see on my iPhone that came into my Verizon account since the iMac settings changed are now accessible on the computer. Many thanks!

The response was dead-on, but the more salient issue is this: Apple's "Auto Detect" is leaving Verizon accounts (and possibly other provider's accounts) open to malicious changes. Consequently, it's an option who's default settings should be OFF, unless the user wants the program to "Automatically detect and maintain account settings."

Hi, the7guys.

Thank you for visiting Apple Support Communities.

Here is the best resource to go through when troubleshooting issues with Mail.

OS X Mail: Troubleshooting sending and receiving email messages

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3276

Cheers,

Jason H.

Thanks, great resource to have. Disabling Auto Detect has worked well so far...

Jason269,

Thanks for your help, but next time please check the page that you are recommending to first to see if it has the relevant information. In this case, it did not. The Apple page you pointed us to DOES NOT address this issue of Apple's AUTO DETECT box causing the problem.

This worked prefect for me, however there was one last step. After I unchecked the server was still locked. I saved the new preference and reopened preferences, and then was able to edit incoming server.

This was a helpful thread.

I do have a question however: is there any way to make editing the e-mail address a possibility? A company I support is changing their name and subsequently needs their e-mail addresses changed.

I've had this problem for a while and could only finally solve it by deleting the email account that had the bad email server (greyed out) and then recreating it with the correct server. Then all the emails got retrieved from the server fine again. I tried all the other solutions, even disconnecting from iCloud, but nothing worked except delete/recreate.