Q: POP option for mail account with El Capitan

Richard,

If you are still having issues with POP and El Capitan respond as there is a way to make POP work with Earthlink in EL Capitan.

I use Yahoo in New Zealand. It is POP3 and has IMAP settings (which it will give but not support).  I have tried all the offered solutions in these threads and eventually setup a gmail account and routed all my email to it from the yahoo server. This was a temporary fix and I was resigned to changing my provider to an IMAP provider, losing my email address and 10 years of stored and filed business emails in my mac mail program.

My restore button was greyed out and finding a to way change to IMAP didn't fix it either. I couldn't use the yahoo mail setup to select POP and worried that El Capitan didn't support POP anymore (as a googled UK thread about Yahoo had suggested from a beta test version in July)

I HAVE FOUND A SOLUTION.  The Yahoo POP accounts need to be deleted completely from the list of accounts. Select and click the "-" tab at the bottom. This did not delete my archived mail despite a warning flag. (It probably would have removed it from Mac mail if it had still been there)

To restore: Under mail preferences, select the accounts tab. On the left side, click + at the bottom to add a new account.  When prompted to "choose a Mail provider", select  "other mail account..." (NOT THE YAHOO TAB!) Re-enter your email address and password ... Whammo. Account restored.

I have yet to rebuild my 10 years of old email into mac mail but can search them quite simply using Sherlock which is pretty good at spitting out the right one if I am specific (and we are talking THOUSANDS of emails here!)

GOOD LUCK ALL

Barn

This did not delete my archived mail despite a warning flag. (It probably would have removed it from Mac mail if it had still been there)

If by "archived" you mean you move the messages to a Mailbox you created in the On My Mac section, then those emails are no longer associated with the account. That's why they were not deleted. Anything in the Inbox, Sent, Drafts, or Trash should have been deleted.

El Capitan requires POP providers such as MSEN to be IMAP accounts.  Comcast just required the same change.  This is glutzy but it works, just be prepared for the added required disk space needed on your Mac

I thought the same was true for Earthlink. Earthlink provides both POP and IMAP.

After I phoned Apple Care they said El Capitan does not force you to use IMAP. It makes it "appear" there is no option but there is an option for POP with all providers. One just has to force El Capitan to give you the option of POP by doing it manually. The only way to manually access POP is to load false email address into the IMAP and then when it does not connect it will open the menu where POP and IMAP are both available. Then the tricky part is to get it to open an account as POP and then after the account is open make sure all SSL is unchecked and the port is the "advanced" section is changed from "0" to in my case 110 and also make sure your user ID is correct as well as password. When you make the correct changes a drop down message appears and says " do you want to save these changes" and you say yes. That means you successfully turned it into a POP account but the IDs, passwords, port # and user name have to be correct to connect. I go fooled at first because I had successfully open a POP account but did not have SSL unchecked and the port # was incorrect.

Sorry but both MSEN and Comcast do not respond to El Capitan’s POP interface, so they both had to be converted to El Capitan’s IMAP protocols.  In addition, MSEN has an outdated trust certificate, trust needed to be downgraded too.

Hi,

I was very excited to find these solutions, as I too really prefer pop for my e-mail setup.  I have gone through all the steps with great eagerness.  Only, I am having errors, and don't know where to follow. 

I took the step to log into my gmail account and turned "Allow less secure apps" to "on."

That alone didn't solve my problem.  It appears that my account actually switched to iMAP.  Not sure if that was me or automatic.  Only solution I figured to try was to delete that account, and try to re-add with the process listed above.

So I have done so, entering a bad e-mail address, setting option to POP, and submitting all my correct account info.  And one of two things happen repeatedly.

1) Preferences Error: There was an error in the Internet Accounts Preferences

or

2) It clocks indefinitely at the data entry screen after I hit OK

I have checked, rechecked and redone this data countless times.  It is correct. 

Does anyone have any idea if I'm doing something wrong, or can do something different that will allow me to re-add this account as a POP account? 

Thanks!

Where you able to successful open an account? The arrow indicates I have successfully open an account. but you still have to get your setting correct in order for "Mail" to talk to your gmail server. UNCHECK SSL and make sure your port setting is correct. When I first forced Mail to give me the POP setting the PORT was set a 0 (zero). The outgoing port should be 587 and if you need help checking it I'll post screen shots.

I assume if you are on gmail your "Description" should read GMAIL and your out going server should read GMAIL.

a

Hi Harvey,  Thanks for taking the time to respond.

No, I'm not even able to successfully open (or re-open!) a pop account.

On Account Preferences window you have on the screen shot above, I click on the + to add a new account.

I select "other account", and add my information with the bad e-mail.

It errors out, and am able to reset the account type to POP and type in the incoming and outgoing mail server info you see in my screen shot above.

It's at that point I either receive the error or it simply clocks indefinitely.

I get the same results from the other two places I can start the add account process -

The Accounts link under the Mail menu,

or the Add Account link under the Mail menu

Any thoughts? I'm feeling pretty stuck.

This may get crazy and need 2 responses to fit images. I notice you did not have a user name. You need to have a user name.

"Outgoing mail server" note the GREEN arrow. After the earthlink.net I had to add a colon and then my email address to open the account.

So the outgoing looked like this smtpauth.earthlink.net:myaddess@earthlink.net.

Now this is where it gets screwy. After that I clicked on "sign in" and it created an account. But then I had to go back and delete my email address because it said EARTHLINK(offline). So I opened this same window and deleted my email address AFTER that it just showed EARTHLINK. But I also had to do a couple of more things.

By the way every time my it asked for my "password" I deleted and retyped.

UNLESS YOU GET TO ACCOUNT TO OPEN IN MAIL AS A POP ACCOUNT YOU CANNOT ACCESS ALL THE WINDOWS I AM SHOWING YOU HERE.

I also had to do the following :

Click on outgoing mail server (only works after the account has been successfully set up!!!) and then click on edit SMTP.

Then click on advanced

Note  in below image there is a 2nd account that I blacked out so ignore that. What you want to look at is the settings.

This is in the advanced after you click on "edit SMTP server list.

Again it asks for a password. I deleted the password and re-entered it. There must be 4 or 5 places it asks for you password and I re-entered it every time. Now the password they want is the password you use in gmail or whatever POP account you are trying to set up. It is not the computer admin password.

Note that SSL is checked on this window but is unchecked on a previous window. If your are still having issues then I suggest unchecking SSL but mine works with this SSL checked. The other SSL with "port 110" is UNCHECKED".

What if the Allow Less Secure Apps was already ON before this gmail problem started?

But I even cannot locate the switch of "Allow Less Secure Apps", could any one advise the location of this selection per the latest web Gmail.

Thanks

https://support.google.com/a/answer/6260879?hl=en

Enabling less secure apps to access accounts

1. Sign in to the Google Admin console.
2. Click Security > Basic settings.
   Where is it?
3. Under Less secure apps, select Go to settings for less secure apps.
4. In the subwindow, check Allow users to manage their access to less secure apps .

Once you've set Allow users to manage their access to less secure apps to on, affected users within the selected group or Organizational Unit will be able to toggle access for less secure apps on or off themselves.

I recently had the same issue but with a Bigpond mail account. This is a POP email account which uses POP3 protocol. Solution was to change the port number. used to be 120 on 10.9 but on 10.11 it has to be 995. Probably a unique arrangement with Bigpond but it least it shows Mail on El Capitan will work with POP accounts. Then you can leave the insecure authentication unticked