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Mail cannot download traffic from ISP

BlueMacawBird

BlueMacawBird

macrumors regular
Original poster
I am having problems with Mail not retrieving items from my ISP. My email was working fine until a few days ago, when some change was made by my ISP and it kicked me out. I updated my password and the web mail is now working fine. I can send items in Mail, and they appear on the web mail account. But Mail cannot receive any incoming traffic and the server does not respond to attempts to get new mail. The request times out.

My ISP only offers support for the web based mail. It is up to users who wish to use mail clients to make that work.

In trying to resolve this, I've been looking at Internet Accounts and there is no option to see details of the current account settings. There is hardly any information at all. I tried to set up a new account (with the same ISP) and that also timed out without a response.

How do I find the details of the current account settings?

My ISP is Astound/RCN, and my account has been set up as POP. I do not want to use IMAP since I manage my email traffic differently on each of my four front line machines.

I am running Tahoe 26.6 on all the machines.

Thanks,

John
 
system settings under the apple in the top left corner
then Network
then Ethernet gives you the settings
 
You might consider going to mail's settings -> accounts pane, and then...
- delete your existing email account
- once the old account has been deleted, create a NEW account
Sometimes that works when nothing else does.

Other than that, I'd suggest visiting the astound support area. Or perhaps even using an AI-based engine to help "point the way" in the direction of a solution...
 
Thanks for all the suggestions. I suspected the change made by my ISP was related to POP accounts. I'll probably give them a call this coming week and see if I can fight my way to real tech support. They really don't want to talk to you once you admit that the web mail is working.

If they have discontinued POP, that leaves IMAP. I have not had an IMAP account, but my understanding is that deleting or moving a mail item on one machine would force an identical move on all machines. Is that correct? Is there any way around that?

And I assume that if I delete the current account, the "on my Mac" folders and mailboxes remain after the account is deleted. Would the new account inherit those "on my Mac" items?

Thanks,

John
 
The "On my Mac" folders you have made would remain where they are on each Mac and aren't connected to the email account in Mail.

Yes, IMAP accounts sync with the server for every move made in macOS Mail within the account.

Perhaps a detailed description of what you've been doing with mail when it comes in on each machine would help someone here come up with a workaround. A lot of folks over the years have had to deal with a POP to IMAP change.
 
IMHO IMAP is the way to go. It allows your incoming AND outgoing email to automatically sync across multiple devices -- Macs, PCs, iPhones, iPads, and web clients. You'll only have to read each new mail item once no matter which device you're on. You can archive or delete emails from any device. And you can usually configure the IMAP mail server to do all sorts of cool things (flag, trash, forward, classify) before it even gets to your Inbox. POP3/SMTP was email from the 1980's and IMAP is email from the 2000's. Try it and I'm sure you'll like it!
 
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I guess your settings are here
astound-prod.mindtouch.us

Email and Server Settings for All Markets

astound-prod.mindtouch.us astound-prod.mindtouch.us
In Mail find 'Mail' top left then about two lines down look for 'Settings'
In settings you will see tabs along the top so find 'Accounts'
In the left hand pane you'll see all your email accounts. Select the email account you want to work on then look across to the right hand pane and you'll see tabs 'Account info' 'Mailbox Behaviour 'and Server settings
You want to look in 'Server settings' and make sure the settings in the page above for pop are the correct ones.
They may have changed the port number.
In my experience when you are asked to input user name and password you have to do it even if it says optional. You complete both incoming and outgoing
Usually you need to tick the box saying use TLS/SSL

If everything is ok then it may just be a problem at their end.
 
One quick thing to check before you assume they killed POP outright: when an ISP tightens TLS on the mail servers, webmail keeps working (the browser handshake is fresh every session) but Mail's cached connection profile can fail silently on the next fetch. Under Mail > Settings > Accounts > [your account] > Server Settings, uncheck "Automatically manage connection settings" for the Incoming side, then verify port (995 for POP-SSL, 993 for IMAP-SSL), Use SSL is on, and Authentication is set to Password (not the greyed-out "Auto"). A lot of "web works, Mail times out" situations trace back to Mail refusing to renegotiate after a server-side cipher bump.

If you do end up switching to IMAP: yes, deletes on one device propagate everywhere within seconds, that's the tradeoff. But "On My Mac" mailboxes are completely independent of any account — they stay put when you delete the POP account, and a new IMAP account won't touch them. What I run on my Studio is IMAP as primary with a Mail rule that copies incoming to an On-My-Mac "Archive-Local" folder automatically, so if the server ever purges old messages or you delete on your phone, the local copy still exists. Keeps IMAP's sync benefit without POP's device-limit trap.
 
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I'm still trying to beat this problem.

The key detail about my problem continues to be that there is no response from the server at all, attempts just time out. Mail tells me that it is unable to verify account name or password. I did try the settings that benholt provided (thanks!) and when submitted the server again did not respond in any way. I also deleted the existing Mail account on my Neo and tried to reestablish it, only to have the same Mail message about being unable to verify the account name or password.

It seems the server is the problem; online queries show that the server address being used is valid. I just spent an hour on hold for tech support at the ISP and finally gave up. I'll try again later, hopefully I can persuade them to pass me onto the real tech support team.

Thanks all,

John
 
OK, I have resolved this issue and my mail account is working fine. Last night I suddenly remembered that my network filter, Little Snitch, occasionally causes problems when opening Safari tabs. So I disabled LS and suddenly my mail worked, immediately downloading all the incoming mail items that I had been missing. I did this on each of the four machines that I use for mail and all of them are now back up to speed (on the Neo, I was able to add back the mail account I had deleted).

Let's recap what happened here. Two weeks ago my mail and LS were happily living together. My ISP made some system change that kicked me out of my mail account and required a password reset. That got my web mail working, but my mail client could send but not receive mail traffic. While I initially blamed the ISP, it appears that whatever they had done conflicted with the block list in LS. I can't explain that, there was no change in the ISP address.

While I have disabled LS for now I do want it back. I have been meaning to clean up the rules that I have put in place over the years, and once I have done that I will be left with the groups of known threats that LS provides as a starting point. If LS is restarted, and does not cause a problem with Mail, then I'm OK. If after cleaning out the block list there is still a problem I need to refer that to LS (Objective Development) for resolution.

I have used LS for maybe five or six years and find it useful but annoying and needing some degree of maintenance, which I have to some extent neglected. Time to catch up on that task.

Thanks to everyone who helped out, I was going nuts over this.

John
 
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