Image courtesy of OrganicKuwait blog
Hi there, SBCGlobal users! I’d like to speak to those of you who work on Macs or Macbook Pros; I’ve been off Windows for a while (wow; I make it sound like heroin, don’t I), so I don’t know if what happened to me today is true on Windows boxes as well as Macs. Read on if you like, though, because maybe you’ve bumped into this problem, too!
One of the things that pleased me when I upgraded to OS X Lion was with regard to the email program. I like Apple’s email program; I find it much less “heavy” and easier to use than Outlook, and for the Lion upgrade, Apple made it much easier to add new accounts. Now, it’s similar to how it works on iDevices: you tell it what account you’re setting up, what the password is, and the program goes out and pulls all the relevant information for you. You don’t have to go to multiple web sites to find out if you’re account uses POP or IMAP; you don’t have to ask your friend in IT what the SMTP server is, or what port you need to use. Account, password, boom, you’re done.
Except this morning, I couldn’t send email any more.
I spent a while debugging–I used to be an IT person myself, in a former life–and determined that the problem was with my SBCGlobal account. I tried all the basic things: force quit of the email program and reopening it; rebooting; yelling at the screen. Finally I deleted the account and re-added it. And boom, I was back in communication.
Here’s the deal (caution: nerdly stuff ahead): apparently at some point, SBCGlobal went from POP accounts to IMAP accounts. When I looked at the configuration information for my account in my email program, the differences were these:
- Incoming mail server had changed from pop.att.yahoo.com to imap.mail.yahoo.com
- Outgoing mail server had changed from smtp.att.yahoo.com:dougom@sbcglobal.net to sbcglobal.net
- Port had changed from 995 to 993
The gist: If you are running Lion, have an SBCGlobal account, and suddenly find your Mac email not sending, delete the account and add it back in again. This will hopefully get you going once more. (You may have to force quit and restart the email program after you make the change–I didn’t, but in my experience sometimes you have to do that extra step.)
That’s all! This little helpful hint brought to you buy your friends at Gear Diary. Spread the word!