BT Mail stopped syncing with apple devices

[felly55]

Thank you for your support with the problem I had. You were right, I had been downgraded to Basic but BT wouldn't accept that. I ended up being unable to access this forum as well, had several conversations through the complaint I raised where BT refused to accept my account had been downgraded and I had to threaten to leave BT to get taken seriously. 

I am now, reluctantly, still with BT on a much improved package from a price perspective but preparing to move away at the end of my current contract. 

I found your comments very helpful.

[Sandyr]

I never did resolve my problem with email syncing between Apple devices. Fair play to Apple & BT, they tried to sort it but it left them both scratching their heads.

Now, if I want to send an email, I make sure I only do it on one device, so that I have a full history of all sent emails. I can receive emails on the three Apple devices I have, it’s sending them where the problem arises.

[felly55]

Thank you, it did get sorted after hours of phone calls and denials by BT that it was anything to do with them. The problem was that BT had changed the status of my account...

[gavsdavs]

Licquorice though i appreciate your reponse i think you've made a number of assumptions.

As I've demonstrated tcp/465 is the ssl port, but there's a mail server responding on tcp/587 too.

Have you considered that there are a number of different versions of 'mac mail' out there within each generation of OSX, each possibly exhibiting different behaviour and possibly carrying root certificate bundles which could have expired (this will stop TLS working properly).

From what I can see there IS a fair number of people saying "my mac mail client can't authenticate to the BT SMTP servers" and I've followed the guidance in those posts and still haven't got a working setup on this particular mac.

As I said, an ipad works, an outlook client works and I haven't said it doesn't work full stop.

I think i've got to tcpdump this machine next to determine what it's actually saying and what to.

[gavsdavs]

It is also pretty unhelpful of BT to have, as one of the first things their tech support will say, is to reset the password on the account....because
a) many users have to change this password on many devices.

b) not only do you have to set the password for the IMAP/POP3 service, you ALSO need to set it for the SMTP service. it's easy to forget this, and to continue to receive confusing error messages. The mail client will behave badly until it's corrected.

c) i'm pretty sure I read that it takes the IMAP/POP3 services a different amount of time to receive the updated password to the SMTP service (ie. it generally says "wait an hour to try this"). Most people get bored by having to wait an hour and will go and use a decent mail service instead.

BT should recognise this as poor service and respond accordingly.