Mail????????
 

hello everyone!

i've been using osx for about 5 mnths now and have never been sucessfull with the mail app.

i've avoided it for some time but i want to use it for one of my accounts. i have all my info correct and when i try to retrieve mail it say "user name and password denied by server"

any ideas?

thanks

Who's your ISP?

AT&T Broadband.

Mail.app vs Postage Stamps
 

Mail.app has never been reliable for me, several work-arounds and half-solutions are discussed within this thread.

Mail has never been a problem for me at all. :)

I noticed Craig R. Arko asked which ISP was being used. Could the ISP have anything to do with my SENDING email being a problem, technically?

---

I can send after many retries, takes alot of time to handle - just for simple small emails (couldn't imagine sending attachments though, sure to fail).

Lately I've started to use the mac.com webmail service instead, works well for attachments.

Receiving email is a breeze with Mail.app, works with no problems.

---

Hmm, could be the ISP?

Jacques

It could be the ISP -- if their server is having problems authenticating your account for outgoing mail.

Do you have to authenticate for outgoing mail? Some ISPs do, some don't. There's a setting in the Accounts portion of the Mail preferences which will let you authenticate if necessary...

I'd check to see how your account is currently set up, and try it the other way. Or talk to your local tech support for your ISP.

Interesting. I sure have fiddled with it lots, not sure if I tried that though. When I'm home (they force NT boxes on us here at work) I'll give it a shot and let you know.

I'm not sure if my ISP even has customer service, it's the very last free-free ISP that I know of on this planet!

Jacques

if pop is working properly, you should be able to telnet to the port and get some status...

yeah....like i have any idea what that jibberish means.

it's not that difficult to extrapolate...

$ telnet pop.mindspring.com 110
Trying 207.69.200.184...
# trying to connect to the IP number

Connected to pop.mindspring.com.
# hey, it worked. we connected

Escape character is '^]'.
# okay, gotcha, control-rightBracket equals "i'm done"

+OK NGPopper vEL_4_16 at mindspring.com ready
# product NGPopper some version says OK, here i am and i'm ready

<30085.1027970535@smith.mail.mindspring.net>
# some index, not very interesting for our purpose

^]
# i'm done here

telnet> ^D Connection closed.
# exit telnet

where's the jibberish? you don't have to interpret anything except that your notion of your ISP's pop server is what you think it is and that it's working.

for further functionality...

http://www.s0ttle.net/texts/telmail.txt

to get different results, you've got to try different things.

The parts that may be confusing are the user input and server responses.

the user enters telnet pop.mindspring.com 110 and the ^] right before the "telnet> " prompt. Everything else is the response from the server.

(And they are talking about using terminal.app, in /Applications/Utilities.) :)

If it were me I'd recheck the settings, possibly using this support page as a reference.

Then maybe try calling the tech support number they provided with your account. This assumes that the account you are trying to check is one hosted by AT&T.

Sometimes it's a little hard to do this stuff psychically. The more information that is provided the quicker the troubleshooting occurs. :)

PS - tell me if the link above is broken.

Craig, if you're able to diagnose email problems psychically I'll be very impressed. I've always had to resort to physical diagnosis...


:)

Been there, done that. :D

Along with network configuration issues, hardware problems and extension conflicts. The training in magic of my youth has not gone to waste.

It helps if you've at least seen the setup once before.

Does the above TELNET help apply to a mac.com email account?

works for me...

The above worked no problem. How can I test it for SENDING mail? That's where the problem has always been for me (and many others as well)..

Many ISP's will not let you authenticate to an smtp server (for sending mail) other than their own. They do this by blocking port 25.

For instance, my ISP, Earthlink/Mindspring requires the following to be set for any mail that I send through them regardless of the account I'm sending from:

smtp server: mail.earthlink.net

If I set my smtp server to : mail.mac.com

and try to send mail from home via Earthlink it will fail. I need to use Earthlink's SMTP server. Perhaps your problem is of a similar nature. Check with your ISP what your smtp settings need to be.

This becomes a little more of a PITA for laptop users as the SMTP settings need to be changed depending on where you are logging in from.

Hugh

My ISP provides no SMTP service, just dial-up. Sending email via Mail.app with a .mac (I use only Yahoo! and .mac email) account works somewhat (after wrestling it a bit) and usually only for small messages.

Looks like if I want to keep this all free, I need to stay away from sending .mac mail with Mail.app - perhaps Mozilla's mail client will do a better job..

Jacques

Yup, AT&T does that too. Just had to fix this for a customer. It is a PITA, although I can certainly understand why they do it.

Use mail.attbi.com for the outgoing SMTP server.