Lion mail server and iPhone/iPad on same LAN

Hi,
I am struggling here - I have set up mail for my main domain. Webmail works, I have managed to set up my account on my MacBook Pro, but I get an error message when I try to set up the account on iPad and iPhone. I also tried to set the mail account up in Outlook, but that didn't work either. So I removed the account from my Mac and tried installing again and it went smoothly!

My set up. I am using Lion Server, and I have installed the server using example.com. I have external DNS hosting, and DNS has the following setup:
example.com - MX - mail.example.com
mail.example.com - A - <my IP address>

In the server admin app, I have my server running with Mail and DNS services running. Under the general tab in Mail I have example.com as Domain name and mail.example.com as Host name.

When I set up the account on my mac, I only used example.com when asked for smtp- and incomming mail server (not mail.example.com). I got a warning regarding my SSL as I am just using the self signed certificate. This made me think that the problem was with the use of SSL. So I tried to disable SSL on my server, but still was not able to set up my e-mail on my iOS devices.

Does anyone have any tips on what I might be doing wrong or how I can make use of my Lion Mail server?

I can´t belive that no one here is running a Mail server on Lion server that is accessable with imap using iOS devices! Is mail server on Lion really that bad?

Gnuff said:

One question though, did you set up your server with the example.com address. Or are you just using it here in place of your real address?

Click to expand...

Hi - really appriciate your answer! I am just using "example.com" as an example. Everywhere I write example.com I am really just using my own domain. I see people usually doing this - maybe to prevent people from using forums like this for hidden advertising of their website?

I too am mostly happy with the mail server - if only I could access it with imap on my iPhone and iPad. I find it confusing that I can set up an imap account on my macbook pro, but not on my iOS devices using the same imap information. Made me think my problem was the certificates since my mac allows me to trust the selfsigned certificate, while the iOS devices do not give me that opition.

Are you using a certificate for your imap and smtp services? If so - have you purchased a certificate, or are you using the default self-signed certificate?

Again - thank you for your reply!

Thank you - beeing able to communicate about my problem really has helped me. My first mistake was that I had the certificates on "require". My second - and this I really should hav thought of myself (but didn´t think of it before you had helped me eliminating other alternative faults) - I was trying to set up the accounts while beeing on the same network as my server. When I marked the certificates to "use" and switched wifi off my iPhone I was able to set up the account on my iPhone. I did not have this problem on my mac because there I had edited my hosts.ini file

I can´t edit any hosts files on my iOS devices, so now I wonder - does this simply mean that I am not able to access e-mail on my iOS devices while beeing connected to the same router/network as my server?

Hi again,
e-mail works as a charm, except as soon as I turn on my wirless, I do get a message informing me that the server doesn´t respond

As soon as I turn my wifi off, it works again.

...not startet thinking about push - but happy to see it is that simple

I use a router that I have limited access to for DHCP. I see you are from Norway - it is from Altibox.

Here is a screenshot of zones... I have not done anything here. It is just the default settings after setting up the server.

If it helps, when I am on my LAN and I try to access one of my domains via http - I just get a login-window for the router. I have edited the hosts-file on all pc´s, but that is something I am not able to do with the iOS devices. Perhaps you have som dns/routing options on your router that tells the router how to handle internal traffic? (just taking a wild guess here - brainstorming )

The router is in DMZ-mode so as we speak all ports are forwarded to the server. Since you do not have to change your hosts.ini files, I guess the difference between our setups is how the router handles internal traffic. But at least the e-mail problem is solved - just have to find a way to rout my internal traffic to my server instead of try to sign in to my router.

Thank you for your help and input

I have been in contact with my ISP and the simplest way to solve this is to set their router to bridge mode and buy and use a private router for my LAN.