Article:		Secure Mail Reading on Mac OS X
Subject:		mail.mac.com does not support SSL
Date:		2002-03-21 12:59:12
From:		markds
I think this is important to mention for those useing mail.app with a mac.com account and relying on SSL. I received a reply to an email message on this topic from Paul Marcos of the mail.app development team at Apple. Although mail.app supports SSL over POP3 and IMAP4, the mail.mac.com servers do not support SSL at this time. Mail.app is in fact falling back to a non-SSL connection but failing to inform the user.

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

• mail.mac.com does not support SSL
  2002-03-21 18:02:44  Jason McIntosh | [View]
  
  
  Hmm. After reading your note I tried another test mailfetch from my (otherwise unused) mac.com mail account, and observed that, after connecting, the "Use SSL" checkbox stays checked, but the port number goes back to 143, the ordinary IMAP4 default. It's unclear exactly what's going on, here.
  
  It does seems rather cheeky of them, doesn't it... OTOH, if you use iTools account for anything else, your password for it probably gets sent in the raw for these other activities.
  
  Thanks for the note.
• mail.mac.com does not support SSL
  2003-05-16 04:19:58  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  There's a possibility that it uses TLS which (simplified) means that they use SSL on port 143.
  
  You could check using tcpdump (or ethereal) in order to see whether the communication is encrypted.
• mail.mac.com does not support SSL
  2003-05-16 04:24:24  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  (replying to my own anonymous post)
  
  mail.mac.com supports TLS on their imap-port:
  
  * CAPABILITY STARTTLS IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ AUTH=LOGIN AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=EXTERNAL STARTTLS