[MlMt] Keeps asking for mail.mac.com password

[Bill Cole]

On 24 Jan 2018, at 12:06, Randall Gellens wrote:

> On 22 Jan 2018, at 7:01, Bill Cole wrote:
[...]
>> Apple's mail system has a history of authentication flakiness, with 
>> periods where some nodes have required a bare username while others 
>> only work with the full email address as username. Also, they have 
>> been moving away from the mac.com domain for a while, and while I 
>> think mail.mac.com should still work, it's fast-flux DNS via Akamai 
>> is much faster (30s) than the {imap,smtp}.mail.me.com hostnames given 
>> at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202304 and that can cause 
>> glitches.
>
> What are the optimal servers to use?

As it says on the linked page: imap.mail.me.com port 993 (imap+tls) to 
retrieve mail and smtp.mail.me.com port 587 (SMTP-based message 
submission with STARTTLS) to send.

I can't say with any certainty that the legacy mail.mac.com name won't 
work essentially forever or that it resolves to a set of machines that 
behave inherently or reliably differently from the me.com names. It's 
just that Apple stopped documenting its existence a few years ago and 
has its DNS set up to require clients to recheck the name every 30s, 
where the 'new' names last for 5 minutes. That difference *shouldn't* 
break anything, but short DNS TTLs have a history of exposing software 
that makes shaky assumptions about name stability.