I am having some difficulties setting up my iPhone and OS X email clients.
On the phone, emails can be received, but not sent. On the desktop, setting up the mail account manually fails with a “SASL PLAIN authentication failed” message and sending from the phone an aborted authentication failed “method=PLAIN” message in the /var/log/mail.log. I can send and receive just fine through the web client (Roundcube).
I’ve scoured as many forum topics and websites as I could and I’ve seen various different explanations - not the least of which being that it takes some time for DNS changes to propagate. I’m stumped.
I did. It finally passed initial tests when I added the profile (using the auto-config file) and ignored the password fields. But the minute I had to authenticate to send-and-receive mails, I was back to square one and the authentication errors in the log file.
On IOs, I had a little more luck. I entered the passwords and they were accepted in the Settings app. I can receive emails on IOs too, but … PLAIN text authentication errors on send as well.
I thought maybe it’s because it’s not asking me for additional configuration options (STARTTLS for instance) but I can’t find those options in settings anywhere. I even looked through the auto-config file to see if I could understand what it was doing. It’s a simple XML file with details anyone could guess from mail-in-a-box requirements and publicly available details about the instance itself.
The only thing I haven’t tried is running the configuration again.
It’s morning here. I decided to simply try changing the password. For some reason, that worked. I wish I knew why though - I used the same characters in the new password save for one (asterisk). All I am left with is that somehow the initial password just wasn’t matching for some quirky, ghost-in-the-machine reason.