Although I’ve never liked Mail, and seldom use it, it has one exceptionally helpful feature, its Connection Doctor, opened from the Window menu.

Those using Apple’s Mail app to connect direct to an SMTP server (rather than with iCloud) may face a rather odd problem which rears its head every now and again: corruption in its SMTP server settings. Apple details app-specific passwords here, and you may need to remind your mail client of the password it should be using, or even generate a replacement. If you use such a mail client, you probably set this up and forgot about it, and sometimes those apps seem to forget the app-specific password too, as I’ve explained here. While Apple’s Mail app doesn’t do anything obtrusive to connect to its SMTP service or iCloud, third-party apps have to access the former using an app-specific password, generated through the iCloud website. There are two special cases of failure which may not be obvious, but which can readily catch you out, even though you may have done nothing to change your mail client’s settings. Apple provides full information about the required settings in this article, and you’ll need to refer to your app’s documentation to see how that should be done. If you’re using a third-party mail client, rather than Apple’s Mail app, then that’s different too. If you’re unsure, open the Apple ID pane and check that Mail appears in the list of apps and is ticked. For most users with Apple’s Mail app connected through iCloud, your Mac doesn’t connect directly with Apple’s SMTP servers, but works through iCloud.

You also need to be clear which app and service isn’t working. If your service is claimed to be running well, that’s no guarantee, of course, but if it’s down then there’s little point in doing anything further until normal service has resumed. Most ISPs have a status page, and Apple’s is here. The next question is whether the remote server is running normally. If it does, then you need to look at your networking more generally. Before you go any further, satisfy yourself that this is only a problem with mail, and doesn’t affect any other Internet service. This article considers how you can find out what’s causing that, and how to fix it.įor something so everyday, mail is surprisingly complex, and for it to work properly there are many different systems which must be correctly set up. Although it might stop receiving mail, most commonly the problem is that it can’t send any.

For example, every so often a mail system which has been running happily suddenly decides that it’s not going to work any more.

Macos smtp server