Gmail no longer picking up my IOL email

calum

Since last Friday, the IOL email account I've had Gmail check for me for the past decade suddenly stopped working. Every attempt Gmail made to collect mail from it resulted in "Connection timed out: There may be a problem with the settings you added. Please contact your other email provider to verify the correct server name and port."

Today I tried deleting the account from Gmail and re-adding it via the Accounts & Import settings in the web client, but I can't re-add it, I just get the same error.

The IOL server doesn't appear to have gone away, or changed settings -- if I enable the IOL account in Mail.app on my Mac with the exact same settings I've been using in Gmail (pop.iol.ie:110), it downloads my emails just fine.

I've tried using gpo.iol.ie instead as I seem to remember that's the canonical server name. I've tried different ports, and I've tried toggling the "always use SSL" setting in Gmail (it had been off, but in Mail.app it appears to be on... doesn't work in Gmail either way).

My wife is having the same issue so I assume it's not something specific to my account. Gmail is still happily fetching email from two other POP accounts for me, so I presume they haven't just suddenly turned off POP access for external accounts (though I wouldn't blame them if they did.. but I'd hope for a different error message in that case).

Anyone else seen it and managed to fix it?

calum

And.... tonight it's just started working again. Nothing to see here, I guess.

byte

Yes, I noticed the same over the weekend, but, as you say, it's back working now.

I wonder if there's a time when IOL just stops their email service?

WDR

It stopped at 13:50 on Friday, and, Lazarus like, woke from its slumber 72 hours later

It never stopped working in Thunderbird for me, so I knew it was a Gmail/IOL issue.

calum

byte wrote: »

Yes, I noticed the same over the weekend, but, as you say, it's back working now.

I wonder if there's a time when IOL just stops their email service?

Bound to happen one day, even if it's only when a cleaner at BT Ireland unplugs the server to do the hoovering and nobody can find the post-it with the BIOS password to reboot it. But until then, I'd guess it probably ticks along with however few IOL users they have left without much intervention.

Sparko

I actually want to close my account because half of Russia seem to be using it and there's no way to change the password. But trying to get BT to help me out with that is proving very difficult.