Internet Accounts preferences can't connect to the account …

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Level 1

7 points

Internet Accounts preferences can't connect to the account …

Updating 17th October to Yosemite and working fine until 3rd November.

Mail was suddenly not able to connect to one of my external hosted e-mail accounts. Another account, same external virtual hosting but other domain, username, pwd is still working fine. Account settings in Mail are exact the same for both accounts (IMAP and SMTP). It's now a week trying to find the problem without any result. Very strange is, that Mail is sometimes suddenly able to connect the invalid account: Last week if I was away from the Mac for 20 minutes, coming back, the account was online. I was able to do some mails and cleanup my inbox. It ends if i reboot the Mac. In my network all Mavericks Macs, iPhones, iPads are connecting well this account.

I did a Mail setup just with the invalid account in a clean Guest User. No chance to connect the invalid account. Adding the other working one was just a thing of seconds.

I found that in System Preferences > Internet Accounts for the invalid account a pop-up asks for "Enter the password for …". Doing so it comes up with "Unable to verify account name or password" with the only chance to Cancel. I think there must be a starting point to my problem.

Is anyone knowing about this? Any help is very welcome.

iMac (27-inch Late 2009), OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Nov 10, 2014 2:03 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

cabaumle Author

Level 1

7 points

Nov 10, 2014 5:31 AM in response to cabaumle

Reply and answering myself.

I had an internal DNS server running on Mac OS X Server accidentially configured in my iMac's System Preferences > Network (Ethernet) > Advanced > DNS. That has blocked the one domain to the world from inside out. Since I have this deleted in my iMac's network configuration and running only with my access providers DNS IP's all works fine.

I was stupid enough to search in Mail configs, Internet Account configs where all the errors came up. Never tested the domain name directly. And it was confusing that I was offline with this only one domain but sometimes it came up anyhow.

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Answer 2

Nov 10, 2014 9:59 AM in response to cabaumle

I'll pass this along to all. I have the same smtp issue. I have two Cox email accounts and a number of Gmail accounts. The Cox smtp server goes offline. Gmail is fine. Yesterday I began pressing every button and the following worked, why, beats me.

Open MAIL got to MAIL PULLDOWN then PREFERENCES then ACCOUNTS then SELECT THE EMAIL ACCOUNT and look at ACCOUNT INFORMATION - now at the bottom hit the ARROW at OUT GOING MAIL SERVER (SMTP) which brings up a list of severs SELECT EDIT SMTP SEVER LIST. now this bring up a list of servers HIT THE ADVANCED BUTTON which brings the properties of the highlighted server below. LOOK AT THE TWO PORT BOXES.

The first selection says USE DEFAULT PORTS (25 465 587)

The second selection asks you to ENTER CUSTOM PORT.

FOR COX: The Cox website says to use port 465. I SELECTED CUSTOM PORT AND ENTERED PORT 465 and exited Preferences AND IT WORKED!!!

So far so good today.

I have no idea whether this has any relevance to the rest of you using other email servers so good luck.

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Answer 3

Jan 16, 2015 8:52 AM in response to cabaumle

@cabaumle Thank you for coming back and posting your solution. If everyone would do what you did, this would become a real Apple Support forum!

Cheers.

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Answer 4

alloceki

Level 1

10 points

Apr 20, 2015 6:47 AM in response to impala409

Going through Mail > Preferences (instead of Mail > Accounts) also worked for me but not by changing the port (although I did check if Earthlink my email provider listed a specific port). There were some discrepancies (one of my accounts with this provider worked while the other didn't). I re-entered the password there. You may want to create a test email account to check if that one would work.

Wasted so much time on this!

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