Other common questions we get from customers at the Service Counter involve email on their portable Apple devices. The most common one is: “I changed my email password this morning, and I can receive new mail, but I can’t send mail anymore. I get an error that my password is incorrect, but I’ve re-entered it and know it’s right.”
SMTP, POP3 and IMAP are all protocols for communicating with mail servers. A protocol is simply a set of rules for how an email client (Outlook, OS X’s Mail, your iPhone, etc) communicate with your mail provider’s servers (Gmail, Hotmail, FAHC, GMAVT, UVM, etc.).
Clients use either POP3 or IMAP to receive mail from mail servers, and SMTP to send mail to servers. For receiving mail, IMAP is newer, and today, more implemented than POP3. IMAP is a two way highway between your device (called the “client”) and your provider. It can completely sync all of your different configured devices, phone, computers at work and home, tablet, etc., with the provider’s server. So if you read, write, delete or move mail around in folders on one device, it is synced with the server and then with all of your other devices.
POP3 is less flexible. It was used heavily when server space was less available for providers to allow long term storage for all of customer’s email. Mail clients configured to use POP3 instead of IMAP as their receiving email protocol can download their email, which they can then keep on their computer/device while at the same time deleting it from the server. Then all mail is kept locally. This was popular when email storage space was limited AND one’s only access to email was from a single computer at home or work.
SMTP is the protocol for sending mail from a client to a mail server. Mail goes from your client to the mail server differently than it is received. Why this is so doesn’t really matter here, but when you change your email password, the important thing to remember is that on many devices, including iPhones, you must change your password for both incoming and outgoing email.
If after a password change for your email, you find you can receive mail on your iOS device but can’t send it, there is just one more step to take care of it:
- From the “Home” screen, tap the “Settings” icon
- Tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
- Select the account you wish to modify
- Tap “SMTP” under “Outgoing Mail Server”
- Tap the primary server
- Enter your new password in the “Password” field
After that, you should have no problems sending mail.