I have had difficulty getting my Apple iOS iPad / iPhone to work with an IMAP service on a non-standard port. The phone kept coming up with verification errors, and I could not find a way to get to a screen to configure the IMAP port. I finally got it working. Here’s how.
The trick is to get to a screen where you can enter the correct SSL / IMAP port numbers into the iPad / iPhone (IMAP port 995 in my ISPs case, rather than the more typical ). What I have discovered it you cannot do this while you are connected to a network! So the work around is described below.
I first published this help on the Virgin Media help forum, as Virgin use a non-standard IMAP port. I then reposted in the Apple support forum, after upgrading to iOS 6.1, as it somehow corrupted my settings. Finally, I was encouraged by the reply from MichelleL1982
OMG this worked…Camayoc you are a lifesaving genius lol…I have been at this problem all day!
So decided to share via my blog where hopefully others struggling with the issue can find a resolution. Please like this article if the help works for you.
- Set the phone into Airplane mode.
- Go to Settings / Mail, Contacts… / Add Account
- Select Other / Add Mail Account
- Enter the account details under the IMAP tab
- Select “Next”. The iPhone will grumble it cannot verify the address, select “OK”.
- Then ignore the warning about the account not being able to send / receive emails and select “save”.
- Now go back in to settings, and re-edit.
- Magically, there are now configuration options for all the SSL ports etc.
- Set the right parameters here.
- Select “Save”. Once again ignore the grumbles about be able to verify the settings
- The turn Airplane mode off
- You email account should now work
Please leave a comment, or simply like if you had this problem configuring your iOS iPad / iPhone for IMAP on a non-standard TCP port and the solution I described above worked for you.
Thank you! After wading through lots of virgin media help pages, this was the real answer – it seems to be a bug with ios.
Thank you very much! you saved me! After two days trying to unsuccessfully get emails after updating my Iphone to new version.. I was able to get it working following your instructions… Great help! thanks again!
Genius. So much for Apple’s self-configuring intelligence. They should be required to have a special key for “I know what I’m doing, turn off the auto crap”. Thank you for this. As a newly subjected wielded of an IOS device this post eases my pain a little. Stuff like this is so much easier on the Android platform because you don’t have a monopoly on mail clients.
Thanks! What an annoyance that was; this blog post is very much appreciated.
Thank you so much for putting this on here. I am a bit of a technophobe, but even I managed to set up my ntlworld mail on my iphone using your instructions.
As my ntlworld account is the primary account that I use, it was a must to have on my iphone.
Thanks again.
Thank you. It was simple and straight forward. I had 2-step verification ON in my GMAIL Settings. When turned-off temporarily, it worked.
Wonderful. After searching through numerous websites the answer was here.