Mac Forum / Applications / Mac Applications / October 2006

That's the way Mail.app tells you that it has had trouble
logging into the server - regardless of *why* it had trouble.

In this case, it probably had trouble connecting to the
server - the failure took place before it even got around
to trying to authenticate with your password.

Apple's .mac mail servers (and, frankly, iDisk servers)
are all very flakey.  I find that I have more trouble
connecting to them more often than not.

Just click (cancel) - don't bother re-entering your
password.  Mail.app will set that account as "offline".
Give it a few minutes and click on the little icon (or
use the menu option) to take the account back online.

Not really.  It's a combination of Mail.app's absurd
means of telling you about a connection failure - and
Apple's absurdly unreliable servers.

I keep a .mac account - it's expensive, but I like the
disk and especially like the iSync stuff.  But I wouldn't
recommend to anyone - ever - to use their mail service
for anything important.  For mail services, there are
far cheaper and far more reliable mail specialist services
out there.  Use one of them.

It's a periodic problem.  When you are having wiggy difficulties at
dotmac you should go to your own .mac page.  Look at the left hand
column at the bottom.  You'll sometimes see outages of one kind or
other.

Right now it has a link down there that says: "Some may be experiencing
difficulty with mail. Please click here for more information."

If you do that you'll see they understand there is a problem right now.

A friend had it a couple of days ago and called trying to figure it
out.  I pointed him there.  I got it briefly yesterday evening.