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Unable to send emails from ipad, iphone or mac. SMTP settings incorrect.

philaustin
On our wavelength

I've been trying to sort this for over a week now. I was finding I couldn't send emails from any of my Apple devices.

I can log in to the Virgin site to send and receive emails, but not the mail apps on any of my devices. The error messages are always to do with 'smtp settings' (whatever they are; I'm just a user not a comms engineer) .

I think I've tried every possible setting, deleted my email accounts and recreated them on all devices, but I seem to be going around in circles.

Whatever the error messages suggest it doesn't work. 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions

ravenstar68
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

Can you humour me and try this command

curl -v smtps://smtp.virginmedia.com -u user:password 2>&1 | grep -e '\s5[0-9][0-9]\s\|\s4[0-9][0-9]\s'

This should capture lines with 4xx and 5xx error codes

Tim

I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media. Learn more

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21 REPLIES 21

用心棒
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

It would be helpful to see what, if any, VM error code is returned by the SMTP server in this situation. On your Mac, open a Terminal and enter the following command where username:password is replaced with your email address and password, i.e. richard.branson@virginmedia.com:Y54kpX5g:

curl -v smtps://smtp.virginmedia.com -u username:password 2>&1 | grep "235\\|VM"

Redact any personal information from the result and post here.

philaustin
On our wavelength

Thanks. I opened a command terminal and typed in username: password. It came back with -bash: username:password : command not found. (Username and password were my actual username and password of course).  When I first opened the command terminal it said “the default interactive shell is now zsh. To update your account please run ‘chsh -s /bin/zsh’. I did this before trying your suggestion. Been a long time since I used unix so I dont really understand this. Maybe chsh means ‘change shell’?

Oh, I see now. I had to type in the complete command line …curl -v, etc…..with my username and password in it. I did that. Nothing happened. It just returned the command prompt philaustin@Phils-iMac ~ %

 

 

 

I’m looking at Accounts in Settings, and see that under ‘outgoing mail server (SMTP) ‘ it says that the account ‘Ntlworld’ is Offline. This cant be right. Surely it should be ‘online’.

用心棒
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

If you enter the command without substituting in your details does it return anything, i.e. copy and paste the command as is into a terminal:

curl -v smtps://smtp.virginmedia.com -u username:password 2>&1 | grep "235\\|VM"

 

I tried that. It just returns the command prompt 

用心棒
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

That is odd, does the command curl smtps://smtp.virginmedia.com -u username:password return anything? If it does then is the VM error code VM300? Is so then repeat the command but this time replace username:password with your details and just post the resulting VM code here; do not be tempted to post anything else as you may inadvertently reveal your username and password.

It returned 

curl: (8) Got unexpected smtp-server response: 421

this time. Does this mean anything?

ravenstar68
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

Can you humour me and try this command

curl -v smtps://smtp.virginmedia.com -u user:password 2>&1 | grep -e '\s5[0-9][0-9]\s\|\s4[0-9][0-9]\s'

This should capture lines with 4xx and 5xx error codes

Tim

I'm a Very Insightful Person, I'm here to share knowledge, I don't work for Virgin Media. Learn more

Have I helped? Click Mark as Helpful Answer or use Kudos to say thanks