Category: Tips and Snippets

Making MobileMe work on OSX Leopard

Before upgrading to Leopard I had no problems setting MobileMe on my Mac Book.

But then I upgrade the other day (Late I know) and MobileMe decided to die and stopped connecting.

I was constantly receiving this error:

"The server cannot be contacted on Port 993" blahblah@mac,com

After my usual round of Googleing, I found that the problem hadn't been solved (not that I could find) and everyone had been told it was Apple's mistake and we had to wait.

But something struck me as odd in the error message. -> @mac,com

I had entered me.com everywhere and not entered mac.com once but it was still getting it from somewhere. Plus I couldn't enter half of the fields, primarily the port number, when I chose to let mobile me configure itself.

So I decided to try and manually connect as another imap account instead of using the default MobileMe settings.

After 5 minutes of experimentation I fixed it!

When creating the account, uncheck the 'create automatically' box, because it puts mac,com into everything instead of me.com BUT it sets the ports to the me,com port: 993 and not the mac,com port: 587 so it will never work.

If you turn off the Automatic account creation, then you can manually enter your server info.

Set the incoming server to mail,me,com port 993 and ssl
Set the outgoing server to smtp,mac,com port 587 and ssl

You should be right as rain from there. (^_^)b

Why am I using mac.com for my outgoing? me.com still wouldn't work no matter what I port field but mac.com did. It works, and people get the right return email address so I am not complaining.

Obviously this isn't a desirable or perfect fix, but it will do for me until Apple finally fixes the auto setup.

Having problems with del.icio.us - unreachable?

I use del.icio.us (A social bookmarks manager, so it calls itself) with Firefox to help me with my bookmarks. I like the idea of adding notes and keywords to my bookmarks... let's face it, I admit it, I'm hopeless at remembering what I put where and what it was called.

Until very recently I didn't realise how much I had adapted to using it in preference to my normal bookmarks... until.. until it stopped working.

Nothing, nada, no bookmarks. I couldn't even browse to the del.icio.us site. Traceroute from here bogged down in Amsterdam, the rest of the guys on Team Ninja could browse to the web site, no problem. I was starting to believe my own paranoiac thinking that it was being filtered, that del.icio.us was being blocked. Nothing explained it.

Then, in sheer frustration, and as I was browsing my FF menu bar I selected "Logout"... pointless menu bar item anyway, I was going to be deleting it soon anyhoo.

But it logged me out.

No, it didn't give me the white screen of death and a timeout message, it logged me out and returned page content. Plus I could also navigate to the main site, all was well with the world and I could book mark once more.

So, if y'all are having a weird problem with not being able to reach deli.icio.us via your web browser and your del.icio.us bookmarks appear broken then try logging out and logging back in to the service.

Tags: del.icio.us, browse, bookmarks, unreachable, blocked, filtered