MacOS mail problems

[abr88]

I seem to have lost the ability to send emails from my late-2013 Catalina Imac using Mac Mail. The mail being (not) sent ("From" my AOL id) goes into the Outbox and just stays there until I delete it from "Sent". The message in "Photo 1" also appears. For a few weeks, if I chose the gmail server on "Photo1" over AOL when this happened (I generally use both AOL Mail and Gmail, id and password for each, both sent from Mac Mail), I used to be able to get the mail sent, but that option now also no longer works. Resorting to "Photo2", I did try to enter "smtp.aol.com" as the "Outgoing Email Account" for "Aol".. in place of "None", but that too didn't help.

The message from "Photo1" keeps re-appearing after computer is sitting idle for awhile; in fact, it also appears upon Shut Down and restart!

If I send mail using my iPhone instead of Imac, everything happens completely smoothly.

If you need more info about this, please let me know. Any help would be very much appreciated!!

 

[abr88]

Last Tuesday, June 11, I posted about problems I was having with MacOS mail on my late-2013 Imac. ( https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/macos-mail-problems.2428879/). Unique in my experience with MacRumors, there were no replies, which makes me think the behavior I was describing is bizarre enough to be only explainable as "cognitive decline" of an aging machine. Those problems mostly persist; the only slight improvement is that now when it refuses to "send' an email from my aol address, it does allow me to select "Google" as an alternate server (it had been refusing to send it at all). But there are new issues: no more of the arrived-email alerts that used to show up on my home screen (the only way to see if there are new emails is to actually log into "Mail" and see if anything's there). Also, all sounds have stopped: no more loud chord when logging in, no more "move to trash" or "empty trash" sound, and so on.

I can accept having to buy a new Imac if in fact there's no way of addressing these kinds of problems. (Also it's slower than it used to be, slow to load a web page, waiting for multicolored wheel to "do its thing -- etc.) But the main problems are mail-related. Again, any info or advice much appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Forum-User]

In order to send or receive email, the Server Settings would need to list your email provider servers and credentials. Your photo shows no email server information, so you should attempt to populate that info for both IMAP (receive) and SMTP (sending). For sending email from your AOL account, you should edit the SMTP Server list. Not sure why you have two AOL SMTP server listings, but when you edit the SMTP Server list, you should be able to differentiate between those two to either delete one or rename one to something that easily separates the two. Then you can configure your Account with the appropriate SMTP server settings that will send email. Hope that helps. This issue doesn't warrant a new machine, although it sounds like the cognitive decline could benefit from adding RAM if you haven't maxed it out previously. Also, make certain you have recent and/or ongoing backups of your files merely based on the age of the machine.

 

[abr88]

Thanks a lot for your response. Fortunately, mystifyingly, an inexplicable complete recovery occurred. I happened to notice, while poking around for a possible cause, that in System Preferences -> Notifications -> Mail, for some reason my incoming-mail alert of choice had switched from "Alerts" to "Banners". (Banners disappear after a second or so; Alerts stay put until dismissed.) Switching it back to "Alerts" solved the mail problem I have been describing in these posts, even though being unable to send an email using the aol server would seem on the face of it totally unrelated to one's choice of an incoming-mail alert! Mine not to reason why, I suppose, unless you have an idea. Anyway, thanks again!