Aquamail suddenly stopped sending and receiving iCloud messages

[Ilfracombe]

Aquamail was working fine till this morning on my Nexus 5.
Suddenly I can't send or receive messages.
I get the messages:
Error sending outgoing messages. Network Error. Connection closed by peer.
Error synchronising mail- Network Error

There's nothing wrong with iCloud account. I can receive and send messages with Mail.app on my Macbook.
As far as I can tell, I did nothing to bring this on. I first could not forward a message, then I realised I couldn't receive messages either.
So what has gone wrong with my Aquamail app on my Nexus, and what can I do about it?

[Ilfracombe]

There is now a big red banner saying "persistent outgoing server network errors"

What's going on?

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Just what it says -- network errors most likely caused by something external to the app.

Try rebooting the phone, if it doesn't help, please capture the issue in the app's debug log.

[Ilfracombe]

Thanks. I've rebooted the phone a couple of times but it made no difference. I've made the debug log file, but I'll need to export it to my macbook so I can send it to you. How do I do that? (I have no idea where the log file is)
(I'm actually using that Nexus 5 to tether to my Macbook, so it's weird that there's a network error on the phone but not on the macbook)

[Kostya Vasilyev]

"where the log file is"

It should be visible at the root of the phone's storage when you connect it to the Mac. The filename is log-AquaMail.txt

"it's weird that there's a network error on the phone but not on the macbook"

There is nothing weird about that.

[Ilfracombe]

OK Thanks. I sent it to your gmail address as advised

[Kostya Vasilyev]

Copying my response here in case there are others with same issue (and I expect there will be).

-----

Thank you for the log.

All of a sudden, the outgoing mail server, smtp.mac.com, does not "want" to enter STARTTLS (encrypted) mode.

I know it's worked fine for a long time, and the settings in AquaMail (smtp.mac.com / port 587 / STARTTLS) are from Apple's support site.

I can reproduce the issue without any mail apps at all, using the command line "openssl" tool in Linux:

- iCloud accounts (@me.com / @icloud.com) use smtp.mail.me.com:

$ openssl s_client -crlf -starttls smtp -connect smtp.mail.me.com:587
...
SSL-Session:
    Protocol  : TLSv1.2
    Cipher    : AES128-GCM-SHA256

- @mac.com accounts use a different server name, smtp.mac.com:

$ openssl s_client -crlf -starttls smtp -connect smtp.mac.com:587
...
139950998923128:error:1409E0E5:SSL routines:SSL3_WRITE_BYTES:ssl handshake failure:s3_pkt.c:617:

So they (Apple) messed something up on the server side.

You may want to try turning off STARTTLS (encryption). I can only assume that this is how your desktop mail app is set up, since it continues to work.

Long press the account -> account setup -> Manual -> Next

You'll be looking at detailed outgoing server settings

Change "encryption" from "STARTTLS" to "None", press Next to try and validate.

-----

Reporting the issue to Apple support and including the openssl snippets from above should help too (I hope).

[Kostya Vasilyev]

BTW - tried K9 Mail, same exact error at same exact command.

I'm not surprised, the error when using openssl was already conclusive enough.

[annen]

Hi, I have been having this problem but just found a fix so thought I add it here in case others experience the same issue.

The Outgoing Server settings should read:
Server name: smtp.mail.me.com
SSL Required: Yes
If you see an error message when using SSL, try using TLS or STARTTLS instead.
Port: 587
SMTP Authentication Required: Yes
Username: your full email address

The Server settings were showing as: smtp.mac.com which worked perfectly until a few days ago.  Not sure why it changed but working fine now once I made that one change.

[Kostya Vasilyev]

@annen --

Can you confirm that smtp.mail.me.com works for @mac accounts (not only @me / @icloud accounts)?