Mojave Mail 'forgetting' server settings

[kathleenruth]

Hi everyone,

I upgraded from Yosemite to Mojave 10.14.3 two days ago, and it took a long time to get Mail 12.2 working.

I'm on a mid-2015 MacBook Pro, and was setting up a POP Gmail account. I'm not on the cloud and prefer to manage my mail locally using Mac's Mail app.

(I'm repeating my initial issues and solutions below in case anyone else is having similar problems - because I spent hours searching online Mac forums and couldn't find much relating to this specific issue)

Initially, despite re-entering the correct password I kept getting this message:

unable to verify account name or password

Following some extensive internet research, I found that other people had resolved this by changing the settings in their Google account to allow less secure apps:

https://support.google.com/accounts...en&visit_id=636877285679163262-294533878&rd=1

I'm not happy with the idea of my google account being less secure, but this worked.


When I opened Mail next day, I was receiving mail OK but couldn't send it.

I tried adding the account as a new account and saw the error msg:

Only a single POP account is allowed.

Maybe that was the issue (I'd had 6 separate email accounts in Yosemite using the same SMTP, that I only used for replying as 'aliases'), so I combined them into one POP account, checked all the settings and it worked.


But when I opened Mail next day, I was again receiving mail but couldn't send it.

Meanwhile I found this article:
http://softwaretested.com/mac/cant-open-or-add-gmail-to-macos-mojave-here-are-potential-solutions/

• So I set Mail app to check for new mail every 15 minutes
• and enabled IMAP in Gmail account (even though I'm not using IMAP)


I checked the settings (again) and under
Mail>preferences> accounts> server settings> Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)

Instead of Authentication being set to 'password' it had flipped back to 'none'.

I set it back to 'password' and it worked. Until this morning...



I checked the settings and authentication had flipped back to 'none' again. I re-set it, and it worked.

At the time of writing it is still working with these settings:

So at least I can send and receive email, but I know when I quit Mail it won't save the settings.

Every time I quit Mail, the authentication setting flips back to 'none' and I have to re-set it to send Mail.

At least I can send mail but I'd rather the settings stayed put!

Does anyone know why this is happening, and is there any solution?

Thank you in advance for any thoughts on this issue.

I appreciate this valuable forum - ever since I got my first Mac in 2008 the kind folks here have helped me through numerous upgrades from Leopard to Mojave!! It wouldn't have been possible without your help!

Even though I'm not a regular contributor it's good to know there is a Mac 'family' that we can turn to when we get stuck!

Thank you!

 

[Honza1]

This is just pointer. Some time ago I had (in prior version of OSX) issue with Mail behaving weirdly - kind of similar to this. I eventually had to completely reset Mail preferences. I found instructions somewhere (Google helped). Do not have those. Turns out, in some upgrade cases (Yosemite -> Mojave is quite far apart) - or simply by accident - the plist for Mail with configuration can get corrupted. No amount of configuring Mail.app is useful, if the configuration is not read back correctly after restart of the app. Not sure how many plists needed to be deleted, but it completely cleared anything in my Mail.app (= make BACKUP!!! of all you need) after which new configurations were retained.
Hope this helps...