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cannot receive email, isp claims it's Apple's fault

For at least two years now I have been able to receive email on my ISP email account, but am been unable to send. I believe this pre-dates my upgrade to Mavericks. My ISP is Grande Communications. I am able to receive and send using my other email accounts in Mail with no problem. This has been an ongoing problem that has caused so much frustration that I avoid using that account. However, I still need to sometimes reply to a message sent to me on that account, but am unable to do so. I have spent countless hours on the phone with both Apple and Grande Communications Support. Apple says my settings are correct and the problem lies with my ISP. Grande says my settings are correct and the problem is Apple's. Has anyone else experienced this problem? Is it truly Apple's fault? Is there a solution?

For what it's worth, A Grande tech told me yesterday that they constantly receive calls from Mac users with the same problem, but there is nothing they can do about it.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on Jul 29, 2015 8:51 AM

18 replies

Jul 29, 2015 4:51 PM in response to Csound1

Sorry, meant to reply to the original poster.

animalia Author

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Jul 29, 2015 4:53 PM in response to Matt Knowles

Don't know what a Comodo certificate is, but not using SSL.

Jul 29, 2015 6:48 PM in response to animalia

animalia wrote:

Don't know what a Comodo certificate is, but not using SSL.

Comodo is one of a zillion different commercial vendors that can provide buyers with tiny little wads of math — certificates — that are the "magical" foundation of most encryption and most trust on the Internet, and these little wads of math can also be quite profitable for the certificate vendors. The little padlock icons you often see in the Safari address bar are all part of this whole scheme.

Recent OS X mail is going to try to use SSL connections, and most traffic really should use SSL. (This is part of why disabling the "automatically detect and maintain account settings" in the Mail > Preferences > Accounts > select the problematic account > Advanced tab can be useful — disabling that maintenance can keep the settings from moving around on you, while you're troubleshooting.)

At least some recent versions of the OS X Mail.app have a failure mode on certificate errors, based on a test mail server configuration that I messed up — that (correctly) causes connections to fail, but (unfortunately) provides no obvious visible diagnostics, and no way to accept the certificate if that's appropriate. Accepting the certificate in Safari meant Mail.app immediately started working. Rummaging in the local and in the mail server logs showed a certificate error.

Note: Blindly accepting certificates is a really bad idea.

cannot receive email, isp claims it's Apple's fault